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UNDER THE SUN. 



LONDON : 
ROBSON AND SONS, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, K.W 



UNDER THE SUN 



ESSAYS 



Mainly written in Hot Countries 



GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA, 

• &utf)or of 

MY DIARY IN AMERICA IN THE MIDST OF WAR j GASLIGHT AND 
DAYLIGHT ; PAPERS HUMOROUS AND PATHETIC ; ETC. 



'The Thing that hath heen is that which shall he; and that which is 
done is that which shall be done. And there is no New Thing under 
the Sun.'— Eccl. i. 9. 




^4£^VVASH\^^ 



LONTTON: 
TINSLEY BROTHERS, 18 CATHERINE ST. STRAND. 

1872. 



TO 

LIEUTENANT-COLONEL JAMES E. FORD, 

SCOTS FUSILIER GUARDS, 



fflflft $00k, 



IN PLEASANT MEMOBY OF DATS PASSED LONG AGO 

UNDER THE SUN, 

IS CORDIALLY DEDICATED. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

AN ESSAY ON WARM WEATHER ix 

EMPTY BOXES i 

FORM-SICKNESS 18 

UNDER THE GUNS OF THE MORRO 34 

THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA 53 

HAVANA CIGARS 77 

HAVANA CIGARITOS 97 

A COURT-YARD IN HAVANA . . . . . . .113 

THE VOLANTE 132 

A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL 151 

THE DIVERSIONS OF LA SOLEDAD 172 

THE CITY OF THE ANGELS 187 

COCKPIT ROYAL 204 

CUAGNAWAGHA 225 

LITTLE OLD MEN , . .248 

NOBODY ABROAD 266 

SHOCKING! 283 

KING PIPPIN'S PALACE 300 

STALLS 317 

WRETCHEDVILLE . , . . . . . .329 

THE HOTEL CHAOS 347 

THE IDLE LAKE 366 

POSTE RESTANTE 381 



/ 



AN ESSAY ON WARM WEATHER. 

I have the greater need to pen an Essay with such 
a title as that which appears above, as introductory 
to Under the Sun, since I sit down to write it on the 
Twenty -fifth of May — the merry month of May! — 
with a blazing fire in my study, and the cat dozing on 
the hearth-rug, instead of enjoying her natural otium 
at this time of the year, in blinking on the coping 
of the garden wall. The housekeeper has just knocked 
at the door to say that the coals are nearly 'out,' and 
that in view of such c bitter weather,' it would be as 
well to communicate with Messrs. Cockerell without 
delay. If the men with the sacks do not come, I 
shall be fain to bite my thumbs to warm them ; and 
I may well strive to kindle a little mental caloric by 
writing about Warm Weather, lest — with the ther- 
mometer looking at me with the stony stare of a 
refrigerator — I should forget that there was such a 
season as Summer at all, or that anything but frost 
and fog could be felt and seen c Under the Sun.' 

I have given to this collection of Sketches of 
Travels and Maimers the title they bear, for the rea- 
son that the majority of their number have a direct 



AN ESSAY ON WJtflM WEATHER. 



reference to the Hot Climates of the lands in which 
I have wandered. The eldest of the papers is nine 
years old; and most of them were originally pub- 
lished in the pages of All the Year Round, from which 
periodical they have been reprinted with the sanction 
of the Editor and Proprietor, Mr. Charles Dickens. 
It may strike the reader (and in a stronger degree 
the critic) that some of the chapters in this volume 
are, neither subjectively nor objectively, of a very 
sunny nature, and have nothing to do with hot 
countries. I may point in explanation, first, to 
the reservation ' mainly' which appears on the face 
of the book ; and next, to the facts that I wrote 
1 Wretchedville' in Eome, and c Stalls' in Spain, under 
circumstances of an abnormally inflammatory nature. 
Those essays were both composed c in a state of 
siege/ and in the midst of revolutionary crises ; and 
they should properly smell of brimstone and boiling 
lava. With regard to the c Hotel Chaos,' in which 
I have endeavoured to depict the aspect of the city 
of Metz during the month of July 1870, I can 
scarcely think that even the severest censor would 
feel inclined to question that it was hot enough 
in Lorraine in the city, and at the time I have 
mentioned. 

So much for my book: but this is not by any 
means all I have to say on the subject of Heat. It 
has long been my ambition to say something in print 
on the subject of Warm Weather and Warm Blood 
in connection with their influence on the Literary 



AN ESSAY ON WARM WEATHER. xi 

Style and Character ; and I should wish it, in the 
outset, to be distinctly understood that I am not 
addressing myself to the jelly-fish section of mankind, 
to whom Weather, torrid or frigid, is a matter of 
indifference; nor to those Hyperboreans who revel, 
physically, in cold ; who c tub' in cold water on the 
First of January, and even when they are forced to 
break the ice with a hammer to reach their bath; 
who delight in skating, sliding, snow-balling, sleigh- 
ing, ; curling,' and other arctic diversions, which to 
me only represent so many varieties of self-inflicted 
agony. Those whom I desire to reach should be 
warm-blooded animals, swarthy and sanguineous souls, 
worn black by the Sun's am'rous pinches. I am not 
writing for Philosophers of the Glacial Period, or 
the shareholders of the Wenham Lake Ice Company, 
or the dragmen of the Royal Humane Society. 

Many more years ago than I care to name, when 
I was a little boy, the house in which I lived used to 
be thrown into periodical commotion by sudden and 
alarming fits of indisposition with which a near and 
dear relative of mine used, from time to time, to be 
attacked. Such a running up and down stairs as 
took place on these occasions is difficult of descrip- 
tion. Warm flannels and hot -water bottles were 
sent for from the lower regions. There were no 
railway rugs — and few railways, indeed, in those 
days — but the thickest of shawls and wraps were in 
request. When the spasmodic sufferings of the in- 
valid in the drawing-room became unusually violent, 



AN ESSAY ON WARM WEATHER. 



the doctor would be sent for. I can remember that 
when the medical practitioner came he was accus- 
tomed to smile, and to say that the sufferer would 
be ' all right presently,' and that his invariable pre- 
scription in alleviation of the symptoms was sherry - 
and - water hot. And, indeed, when the flannels 
and bran-bags and water-bottles had been applied; 
when the patient had had a dozen extra coverings 
wrapped round her ; when she had been laid on the 
sofa with a pillow under her head; and especially 
when the fire had been well -stirred and the hot 
sherry-and-water administered — she would rarely fail 
to fall into a tranquil slumber, and to wake up after- 
wards quite composed and cheerful, to be, as here- 
tofore, our hope, and comfort, and joy. I should 
observe that these visitations always took place in 
the winter months, that their severity was in a pre- 
cisely proportionate ratio to the asperity of the 
weather, and that their most marked symptoms were 
a (deficiency of circulation in the extremities, accom- 
panied by violent shivering. We children, under 
these terrifying circumstances, used to cower in 
corners, quaking with appalling misgivings; for we 
were but five left from thirteen brothers and sisters, 
and we had very early indeed begun to understand 
what Death meant. As it happened, my relative 
survived the severest of her shivering fits (one which 
took place when I was a very small boy) full fiYe- 
and-twenty years; and I am glad to conjecture, nay, 
to believe, now, that ague or palsy had nothing what- 



AN ESSAY ON WARM WEATHER. 



ever to do with my dear Mother's ailment. She 
trembled only because it was January, and a hard 
winter, and she was so very cold. She was a West 
Indian, and Cold to her was Pain. 

I had the fortune, or misfortune, in after years to 
be sent to a school in which the boys were never 
beaten— nay, not to the extent of a rapped knuckle 
or a boxed ear; and to that circumstance, perhaps, 
may be ascribed the generally imperfect nature of 
my education, and my inability at this day to mas- 
ter the niceties of Latin prosody. Had I been 
duly scourged, I might by this time have become 
another Codrus, and — in slightly bronchitic accents — 
have recited another Theseid. I can nevertheless 
conscientiously aver, comparing my own experiences 
with those of friends educated under the beneficent 
rule of Doctor Busby, Professor Thwackum, and Mr. 
Plagosus Orbilius, M.R.C.P., that the physical an- 
guish I endured during my school-life was quite as 
severe, although not so ignominious, as though I had 
been beaten every day into bruises and blains. I was 
never Warm enough. From July to September (if 
the skies were favourable, and there was nothing the 
matter with the Gulf Stream) I enjoyed a temporary 
respite from chilliness. During the remainder of the 
year I shivered. The Getting-up Bell (which was 
rung at half-past five) pealed on my ear as awfully, 
in degree, as the dreadful ding-dong of St. Sepulchre's 
may peal on the tympanum of the wretch in Newgate 
doomed to die : yet, happier he, the knell is audible 



AN ESSAY ON WARM WEATHER. 



to him but once. / heard the Getting-up Bell every 
morning, clamouring and screeching, ' Come out. 
Come and be cold. Come and have a blue tip to your 
nose, and gooseflesh at the ends of your fingers, and 
chilblains on all your toes. Come, and shudder, and 
clash your teeth together.' That was the kind of 
invite I heard in the bell. I know that for a length 
of time I spent half my pocket-money in bribing a 
boy, whose seat was nearer the stove than mine in 
the class-room, to allow me to occupy his warm cor- 
ner, and that 1 would smuggle additional clothes into 
the dormitories, or borrow my schoolfellows' blankets, 
to cover myself at night. I know that I have had 
impositions of horrible length set me for the offence 
of going to bed with the major part of my garments 
on. I had a schoolmaster, once, who was a clever and 
excellent man, but a little mad, and who had a craze 
about making boys ' hardy.' He was pleased to fix 
upon me as a ' chilly mortal,' and expressed a deter- 
mination to ' make a man of me.' The process of 
manufacture demanded that when I was snuggling 
over the fire and a book in play-time, I should be 
driven forth into the bleak and bitter open c to play.' 
Now I never could play. At this date, when I am 
grizzling, I scarcely know a cricket-bat from a stump, 
or prisoner's base from rounders. I never could throw 
a ball, or catch one, properly ; and in childhood I was 
utterly unable even to 4 tuck in my twopenny' at leap- 
frog, or to drive a hoop. So, while a hundred merry 
lads round me raced and gambolled, I used to lurk 



AN ESS A Y ON WARM WEATHER. xv 

in a corner of the playground and Shiver. We had a 
large bathroom, and (always with the benevolent idea 
of 4 making a man of me') I was put through a bas- 
tard course of hydropathy. I declare that in the 
midst of the most biting winter weather I have 
undergone the cold douche, the cold shower-bath, 
and the cold sitz; that I have been packed in wet 
sheets ; that I have been made to put a dry pair 
of socks over a wet pair, and thus accoutred have 
been ordered to walk from Hammersmith to Kew 
Bridge, before breakfast, in the dark, to make me 
'hardy.' Unless another boy of the same 'hardy' 
breed was sent with me to see that I went through 
my training properly, I used to perform the journey 
from Hammersmith to Kew Bridge by sneaking to 
the widow Crump's shop at Turnham Green — she sold 
fruit, toys, periodicals, and sweet-stuff — and sitting 
by the fire in her little parlour, drinking warm gin- 
ger-beer, and reading the Lives of the Pirates and 
Highwaymen. 

The puling, sneaking, lily-livered milksop ! I hear 
the Hyperboreans cry. I acknowledge the hardest of 
the impeachments; and I confess, indeed, that indi- 
rectly I defrauded my parents by my persistent chilli- 
ness; for we had a racquet court, a quintain, and a 
gymnastic apparatus at school. We were entitled to 
lessons in swimming, fencing, riding, and calisthenics ; 
and had I availed myself of all the Olympian facilities 
at my command, I might by this time have become a 
distinguished athlete, well known in the higher mus- 



AN ESSAY ON WARM WEATHER. 



cular circles in Elis. As it chanced, my good crazy- 
master did not make a man of me. I grew up to be 
only a sickly, long-legged, weak-knee'd youth, with 
premature pains in the bones, which developed in 
later years into chronic rheumatism and intermittent 
neuralgia. 

I had some glimpses of Warm Weather when I was 
a child, being much abroad, but only in temperate 
climes. But from the age of thirteen to nearly thirty 
I lived mainly in London, and you know what Cold 
Weather, and Warm Weather, in the British metro- 
polis mean. With Creole, Italian, Portuguese, Red 
Indian blood in my veins (I am afraid that my great- 
grandmother on the maternal side was a squaw, and 
was tattooed), I was always panting to be Under the 
Sun — the real Sun, not the tepid simulacrum we see 
in this country — but it seemed as though my wish 
was never to be gratified. I was always repeating : 

Yet bear me from the harbour's mouth, 
"Wild winds ; I seek a warmer sky ; 
And I shall see before I die 

The Palms and Temples of the South. 

I saw them, and the Sun himself, at last; but I was 
constrained to seek my goal by a round-about route. 
The first real, glorious, blazing, sweltering Summer 
I basked in was in Russia. The Cholera was rife 
in St. Petersburg when I went there. The fashion- 
able season was over, and all the grand folks were 
out of town. The streets were dusty, the canals were 
malodorous. What did all these things matter to me ? 



AN ESSAY ON WARM WEATHER. xvii 

It was Summer, it was Hot. My rheumatism took 
unto itself wings, and flew away. I could once more 
feel my blood in its circuits. A long- congealed mind 
began to thaw, and during that summer in Russia I 
studied and worked more vigorously than ever I had 
worked or studied before, in my life. 

Now and then, among the few favourable things 
people have been good enough to say about me, I have 
been complimented on the score of my 'industry.' 
Hearing such a compliment, I have chuckled, not bit- 
terly, but with much inward merriment, as knowing 
myself to be constitutionally one of the most indolent 
of men. ' Ah, monsieur,' pleaded the French beggar to 
the stern economist who reproached him with his vaga- 
bondage, c sivous saviez combienje suis paresseux!' 
If you only knew how idle I was; how I have wasted 
three-fourths of the time at my disposal — after the 
necessary deductions for sleep, meals, and recreation 
had been made — in purposeless ' mooning,' in hatching 
vain schemes, in covering the margins of books with 
trivial notes, in filling commonplace books with use- 
less entries, in making sketches for pictures I shall 
never be able to paint ! In the face of a shelf full 
of books, and thousands of newspaper-columns I have 
scrawled, I know that, so far as Time is concerned, 
I have wantonly squandered my substance and wasted 
my oil. I know, and can honestly declare, that so 
strongly is the far niente temper ingrained within me, 
that 1 have never sat down to serious labour without 
reluctance, nor risen from it without exultation, I 

b 



AN ESSAY ON WARM WEATHER. 



wonder how many 'prolific writers/ 'interminable 
scribblers/ 'assiduous hacks/ might make the same 
confession, were they only candid enough to do so? 

One cannot, indeed, repudiate one's own handi- 
work; and during a literary course of three-and- 
twenty years, a man whose only source of livelihood 
has been his pen, must needs have accumulated a 
mass of work performed in some manner or another. 
The craziest dunce's punishment-tasks will fill many 
copybooks. Thus, when I look at the volumes and the 
newspaper-files before me, and ask how ever I could 
have nerved myself to knead all these stacks of bricks 
— often with the scantiest allowance of straw — I 
remember that I have always worked better in sum- 
mer than in winter, and that I have always worked 
best Under the Sun, thousands of miles away. The 
Summer of 1864 was intensely hot; yet I managed 
to do more work in the United States, in Mexico, 
and in the West Indies, in three months than I had 
done in all the preceding three years. I felt my 
blood in every vein, and it oozed out of my fingers, 
and so into my pen's point, into red ink. The 
glorious warm weather melted away the mists and 
fogs by which I had been surrounded. I had been 
Hot and Happy. In a kindred but modified degree 
I have recognised the same influence of Sunshine as 
encouraging activity in my own individual case — and 
what do I know about other people's ? — in Italy, in 
Spain, and in Africa. I have been at home now, 
with brief intervals of continental travelling, for four 



AN ESSAY ON WARM WEATHER. 



years, and I have written nothing worth reading. No 
original book of mine has seen the light for a very- 
long time ; and my publisher had to make my life a 
torment to me ere he could incite me to collect these 
papers and correct the proofs. If any persons wish me 
to be industrious, let them combine in demanding 
that I should be banished very far beyond the seas, 
and to the hottest climate procurable. A double 
purpose would thus be served. Those who disliked 
me personally would be able to get rid of me; where- 
as those who did not hate me might profit by my 
absence by communing with me from afar off. 



GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA. 



Brompton, May 1872. 

(It is the warmest part of London that I can find 
to dwell in ; and the mud in the Fulham-road 
takes trvo days longer to dry up than is the case 
at Hampstead. ) 



UNDER THE SUN. 

ESSAYS MAINLY WEITTEN IN HOT COUNTEIES. 



EMPTY BOXES. 

This will be, I know, but a beggarly account. There 
are few things in the world so hopelessly dreary to 
look upon, as are empty boxes. It is a truism to 
say that you can get nothing out of them. A full 
box may be picturesque, poetical. It may be Pan- 
dora's box, or one of Portia's caskets. It may be 
the Iron Chest, or Somebody's Luggage. It may be 
that notable trunk in which the mysterious Spanish 
Hidalgo, to whom Gil Bias was valet, kept his pistoles. 
It may be the coffer, gorged of millions, of the Wan- 
dering Jew. It may be Autolycus' box, crammed 
with c ribbons, chains, and ouches,' or it may be the 
; chest with the spring -lock immortalised in the story 
of Ginevra and the ballad of the Mistletoe-bough, or 
it may be the cowskin trunk in which Richard Crom- 
well kept the 'lives and fortunes of the people of 
England' — in the shape of the addresses presented 
to him by the English municipalities when he was 

B 



UNDER THE SUN. 



Lord Protector of the Commonwealth — or it may 
be the inscrutable sea-chest astride which Washing- 
ton Irving's Dutchman went to sea in a storm. In 
short, a box with anything in it will furnish a plot 
for a melodrama or a novel, inspire poets and painters, 
awaken cupidity, excite ambition, fan the flame of 
loye. With what wistful eyes have I scanned the 
great iron safe in a City counting-house! With 
what rapture have I gazed on a lady's jewel-box 
— the tiny casket with a patent lock, steel beneath, 
russia leather above — and pictured the dainty gems 
within : their lustre prisoned in coffins of morocco 
lined with white satin ! Nor without a pleasant 
trembling — a hope not unmingled with fear — have 
I beheld the cash-box which Mr. Elzevir, of Lud- 
gate-hill, has produced from his drawer, when, my 
account being audited, he has been persuaded to 
draw a cheque in my favour. Sweet cash-box, full 
of cheques, crisp bank-notes, gold and silver, and 
sometimes of acceptances at three months and 1 IPs ! 
— I say that I have trembled, for it has been just 
within the bounds of possibility that Mr. Elzevir, a 
sudden spasm of hardness coming over his heart, 
might push his cash-box back into the drawer, double- 
lock it, and suddenly remembering that my account 
was overdrawn, button up his pantaloons, and dismiss 
me chequeless. Or, how would it be if, opening the 
cash-box, Mr. Elzevir discovered that his cheque-book 
was worn to the last stump, and begged me to call 
the day after to-morrow? 



EMPTY BOXES. 



If this paper were to be devoted to the topic of 
boxes that were full, you should see that I had plenty 
to say, and to spare. The account of the work-box 
of a woman would fill a page at least. I could expa- 
tiate till you were tired on a schoolboy's play-trunk, 
with its hidden hoard of slate-pencil, and its inevit- 
able substratum of contraband goods — say gun- 
powder, silkworms, cayenne pepper, or the Adven- 
tures of Robin Hood; — and I am sure I could pen 
several columns on the subject of a box to me the 
most curious of all, — the key-box ; the locked-up re- 
ceptacle for things which lock up others, the wheel 
without the wheel, the keeper of the keepers. It is 
on empty boxes, however, that I am at present intent. 

Empty boxes ! Take that symmetrical sarco- 
phagus of cedar which, a month since, held one 
hundred choice Havanas. They, the flor fina of 
Colorado Claros, are all smoked out; you have not 
even preserved their ashes, which, mingled with 
camphorated chalk, are said to make an excellent 
tooth-powder, or, ground with poppy oil, will afford, 
for the use of the painter, a varied series of delicate 
grays. Old Isaac Ostade so utilised the ashes of his 
pipe ; but, had he been aware of Havanas, he would 
have given us pictures even more pearly in tone 
than those which he has left for the astonishment 
and delight of mankind.* 

* Much has been talked in modern times about the ' lost secrets' of 
the Venetian painters ; and Messrs. Winsor and Newton have been wor- 
ried to death by artists to produce new blues, new crimsons, and new 
yellows, by means of which the gorgeous hues of Titian and Giorgione 



UNDER THE SUN 



The empty cigar-box makes you sad. You must 
have injured your constitution to an appreciable de- 
gree by smoking, say fifty out of that century of Colo- 
rado Claros. You have lately discovered that your 
cousin Tom, on whom you pressed a handful of your 
choicest cigars when you left him at Gravesend, on his 
way to Bombay, is a humbug. It was owing to your 
cruel and brutal persistence in smoking the last of 
your cigars in the Blue Boudoir, thereby disturbing 
the afternoon nap of the Italian greyhound, and caus- 
ing that intolerable little beast to sneeze thrice, that 
you had last Thursday a few words with the partner 
of your joys and woes, and afterwards looked out in 
the Court Directory the private address of the judge 
who sits in divorce and matrimonial causes, and has 
power to loose and to bind. Worse than all, you have 
a running account with Messrs. Lope de Yega and 
Co., cigar merchants of Bond-street, W., and the hun- 
dred Colorado Claros, all smoked out, remain to be 
paid for. 

If empty boxes yield anything, the harvest is 
but one of regrets. The scholar who bade Albertus 



might be rivalled. But the tints most thoroughly lost or mislaid are, 
to my mind, the pearly gray tones of the Dutchmen. Very few modem 
painters seem to be aware that gray may be, and should be, a cunning 
compound of all colours, and not mere black and white, with a season- 
ing of lake, or indigo, or ochre, to make it cold or warm. The finest 
grays, perhaps, in modern art are those of M. Abel de Pujol, in the 
imitation of bas-reliefs on the coved roof of the Paris Bourse. Those 
who have closely examined them may have noticed that in the shadows 
there are great splashes of positive colour, bright vermilion, chrome, 
and cobalt, which, at the distance of the ordinary spectator from the 
picture, give pearliness and transparency to the whole. 



EMPTY BOXES. 



Magnus raise the devil for him, found, dashed in his 
face, an empty purse; and if you would conjure up 
the ghosts of dead hopes, and the phantom of the 
love that is no more, and the skeleton ribs, black and 
rotten, of the Ship of Ambition, aboard which you 
vowed to ride into the Port of Fame and seize the 
Golden Fleece — if you would lift the veil, and recall 
the agony, .and survey the wilderness of desolation 
and the valley of dry bones, I would advise you to 
f)lunge into the contemplation of empty boxes. 'The 
late Miss Craggs's Estate.' Such an inscription on a 
japanned tin box, in a lawyer's office near Cavendish- 
square, once meant to me a thousand pounds. The 
box was full. I saw a will, trust-deeds, dividend- 
warrants, through its tin sides. I walked round the 
house that held the box, in my dreams, and woke up 
in terror, thinking that thieves had stolen it, and 
longed for the day when I should be twenty-one, and 
find a swift stockbroker, and sell my money out. It 
never did anybody any good. It is lost in the fast- 
nesses of the Neilgherry Hills ; it is at the bottom of 
the river Rhine; it is in Kensal-green. I shudder 
now to think that I may meet some day in Ship-yard 
or Broker s'-row an empty box, the japanning half 
worn off the tin, and the late Miss Craggs's Estate 
grinning out of the shadows made by piles of second- 
hand office furniture. I do not think I could bear 
that sight. I should buy the box, and scrape out 
all remembrance of Miss Craggs, and melt up the 
japanned tin to an unrecognisable lump. Saddest 



UNDER THE SUN 



of empty boxes ; and the vanity of youth unto- 
ward, ever spleeny, ever froward! What a school 
might be built, what a house bought, what a neat 
little purse made against the laying of the first stone 
of the Asylum for Decayed Turncocks by H.R.H. the 
Prince of Wales, what a capital venture made to the 
Spanish Main, with a thousand pounds! Depend 
upon it, the Prodigal Son had an empty box, and 
sat upon it the while he tended swine and fed on 
draff and husks. 

Saddest of empty boxes ? No, not the saddest. 
There are boxes whose aspect is even more melan- 
choly. Kicked about in yards, despised as the vilest 
rubbish, are the boxes which once held the sparkling 
chefs-d'oeuvre of Mumm and Roederer, and Jacques- 
son, and the Widow Clicquot. Who cares for an 
empty champagne -box ? An empty egg -box is 
stouter. The empty box which has contained bottles 
of Warren's blacking will afford a firmer rostrum 
from which Stump Orator may address his dupes. 
It is not generally known that the haut pas of the 
thrones from which theatrical kings and queens issue 
their decrees, and witness the evolutions of the occa- 
sional ballet, are often built up from egg -boxes. 
Champagne -boxes would be too fragile. This is 
the end, then, of all your frothing, and popping, and 
spuming forth effervescent delight. A bottle, if it 
be not cracked, may serve again. Shot, or a wire 
besom, may cleanse its interior. It may be degraded 
to serve as a candlestick for a tallow dip, but it may 



EMPTY BOXES. 



be washed and purified, re-filled, re-corked, re-wired, 
re-wrapped in pink paper, re-exported, to make the 
name of the Widow Clicquot famous to the ends of 
the earth. But its empty box will never serve again. 
Rough deals are cheap, and can be easily nailed to- 
gether, and daubed with mystic trades-marks and 
legends, as 'Fragile,' 'With care,' 'This side up- 
ward,' and a portrait of a full (not empty) bottle. 

Writers who set up for cynics are very apt to 
talk of the skeleton closet which is said — although I 
do not believe anything of the sort — to form part 
of the architectural arrangements of every modern 
house. At least, I do not believe in the solitary 
skeleton — the one bony osteological 'boguey' — hang- 
ing to a nail in one particular cupboard, of which only 
the master — if it be not the mistress — of the estab- 
lishment keeps the key. But if you will mount to 
an apartment at the top of the house — an apartment 
which is open to all, cook, butler, and housemaid, and 
whither the children often repair for the purpose of 
playing at Wild Beasts, or at Shops — you may find, 
not one, but twenty skeletons, in the shape of empty 
boxes. There are the portmanteaus, long since bulged 
into uselessness; the bullock- trunks of the lieutenant 
who died in India; the bonnet -boxes of the girl 
who bloomed into a woman and is now a widow ; 
the carpet-bag you used to carry on those rare 
fishing excursions to Walton-on- Thames ; the little, 
fat, black valise which was your companion during 
that notable week you stayed at the country-house of 



UNDER THE SUN 



the Lord Viscount Toombsley — the only lord you 
ever knew — and he cut you dead in the Burlington 
Arcade last Wednesday was a week. Pleasant jour- 
neys, joyous outings, trips to Paris, runs to the 
Rhine, wedding tours, jolly friends, pretty girls, 
merry meetings : the spectres of all these linger 
about the empty boxes. Look at the luggage-labels. 
You can hear the pat of the paste-brush, and see the 
red-faced porter trundling the luggage along the plat- 
form. You are off by the express. A guard has 
winked at you. He feels that you want a locked-up 
coupe, that you mean to smoke, and that he will have 
half-a-crown. You are off for Paris. You are off 
for Switzerland. You are off for the East. Empty 
boxes! I have one, the bare sight of the luggage- 
labels on which fills me with sorrow, with remorse, 
with bitter shame. ' Liverpool,' l Manchester,' ' Bos- 
ton,' 'Niagara,' 'Madrid,' 'Riga,' 'Cronstadt,' 'Wien,' 
' Seville,' ' Frankfort,' ' Homburg,' ' Venezia,' ' Paris,' 
' Macon,' c Milan' — it is a Bradshaw cut up into strips 
and stuck hup-hazard all over the lid and sides. I 
thank the prudent porters who have striven to tear 
off some of the labels. I am spared the remembrance 
of some. This empty box has held my gala clothes, 
my dearest books, my choicest photographs, my rarest 
bits of bric-a-brac, and c the soul of the licentiate Pe- 
dro Garcia.' And what has come of it all, beyond forty 
and odd years, an augmenting stomach, a damaged 
liver, and a confused consciousness that one has made 
rather a mess of it, and had better have stayed at home ? 



EMPTY BOXES. 



But we will endeavour to be cheerful, if you 
please. Cheerful ! How can cheerfulness be ex- 
tracted from empty boxes : far less when I am about 
to conduct you to the dullest and gloomiest of all the 
boxes in the empty world. Silent rows the songless 
gondolier, and sullen plash his oar-blades on the 
waters of the back-slum canal. I am going to see 
the mornfulest sight in Yenice. At the prow crouches 
the hotel guide. He too looks sad, although he is 
in my service to-day; for I have told him that to- 
morrow I shall have no need for his services. I have 
' done' all the lions of Venice twice over ; and Venice 
is in a state of siege, and I am the only tourist in the 
desolate city ; and my guide has been half starving 
for weeks, and will wholly starve, I fear, when he 
has spent the last two florins I purpose to bestow 
upon him. For charity begins at home ; and few 
travellers care to grant weekly pensions to hotel 
guides out of work, who are always bores, and often 
rascals. The oars continue dully to plash ; and the 
gondolier — who has not had a fare for a week — only 
breaks the sickening silence by his lugubrious cry of 
warning when he turns a corner. There was a time 
when I went a gondoliering with the pleasantest of 
poodles at the prow; but darker and darker days 
have set in for Venice; and things have gone from 
bad to worse, and the city has faded into a cemetery. 
Whither are we bound? To the magnificent palace 
which has been turned into the governmental pawn- 
shop, and through whose windows, now close barred, 



io UNDER THE SUN 

but whose balconies were once hung with rich tapes- 
tries, and over whose sills fair ladies smiled, moun- 
tains of unredeemed pledges in ghostly bundles palely 
loom ? Not thither. To the deserted halls of the 
great Pesaro Palace, now converted into an old- 
curiosity shop, rented by a Jew from Geneva? Not 
thither. To the empty arsenal, with its shipless 
basins and ropeless rope-walks — the arsenal where 
Dante once saw the pitch and tar boiling in huge 
caldrons that reminded him of the Stygian Lake ? 
No; not thither. Nor to the island of Murano, 
where the huge mirrors and crystal chandeliers of 
Venice were once made, but where now there is only 
a paltry manufactory of toy-beads. Nor to picture- 
gallery, nor church, nor cabinet of mosaics. We are 
only on our way to see some empty boxes. 

A dreadful beggar-man, by his father's side a 
leper, by his mother's a hunchback, and himself an 
idiot ; a creature whose rags are so intimate with his 
flesh that the tatters might be strips of unwashed 
epidermis — this specimen of the Eepublic in Kuins 
with a long hook draws our gondola to the landing- 
place, holds out his shrivelled arm to help me to 
shore, cringing low as he begs an obolus for the sake 
of the Madonna, and is grateful for the farthing which 
I give him. (For as, all day long, the beggars of 
Venice buzz about you, and you are bound to relieve, 
say one in ten, you will find that a soldo, or farthing, 
at a time will make, before midnight, a considerable 
vacuum in your pocket.) We mount some slimy 



EMPTY BOXES. n 



steps, and pass under a colonnade, whose stones are 
damp and green, and recall those of a dead-house by 
the water-side. Between each pair of columns hangs 
a huge lamp, some faded gilding clinging to its iron- 
work, and its top crowned with the battered effigy of 
a phoenix. c Those lamps,' whispers the guide, c have 
not been lighted for seven years.' We stand before 
an old wooden door, the knocker and the keyhole 
red with rust, the huge-headed nails which once 
studded it half gone, the holes left black and mean- 
ingless, like the sockets of dead eyes. Paint it must 
have had, this door, in the bygone ; but mildew has 
picked the pigment away, and streaks and smears of 
oozy moisture laugh grimly at what the painter's 
brush may have effected years ago. This was once 
a stage door. Hither the pets of the ballet came 
tripping to rehearsal, with wreaths of artificial flow- 
ers in their reticules, and practising shoes under 
their arms. Here the servitors of the Venetian no- 
bility left perfumed billets. Here the great prima 
donna, Assoluta di Cartello, landed from her own 
splendid gondola, and, perhaps, condescended to be 
assisted to shore by the primo tenore. Where once 
her stately feet trod, is now only the brackish sea- 
slime. We knock at the door, and, after a while, a 
Judas-wicket opens, and through the grating peers 
a wrinkled old parchment face, with a few white 
bristles on the chin, which Balthazar Denner might 
have painted. A piping voice inquires our will. I 
answer, that I wish to see the empty boxes, and 



12 UNDER THE SUN 

I softly slap some loose florins in my pocket. The 
Judas -trap closes ; but anon the door itself is 
opened, and a little old man, who might have been 
a junior clerk in an office close to the Eialto when 
Shylock did business there — who, as a specimen of 
Venice Preserved — seemingly in a solution of garlic 
— is highly respectable no doubt, but who is assur- 
edly the nastiest old man I have set eyes upon dur- 
ing many a long day's march — entreats me, with 
many bows and complimentary adjurations, to enter. 
We cross a vestibule — the stage-doorkeeper's den — 
and see the rusty nails whence once hung the keys 
of the dressing-rooms, and the places of the racks 
where the perfumed billets once rested. It is inex- 
pressibly dingy, and smells of lamp-oil a hundred 
years old. The nasty old man has kindled a rush- 
light, and, by its pale glimmer, guides us up a damp 
stone staircase. Then we go down some steps, then 
mount again, then pass through a narrow corridor. 
I remember that, some months ago, a guide as old 
and as nasty led me up and down the stone staircases 
in the palace of the Escorial. He was a sexton, and 
took me to the sepulchre where the kings and queens 
of Spain are buried in stone boxes resting on shelves, 
and where there are yet some empty boxes waiting 
for the kings and queens of Spain that are to die. 

We emerge into a dim area, and stand on the 
stage of an enormous theatre. The sconces of the 
footlights seem to mark the boundaries of another 
world, and all beyond them yawns the dark vasty gulf 



EMPTY BOXES. 13 



of pit. From a window in the topmost gallery darts, 
sharp and clear, one transverse ray of light, and I 
am enabled to make out at last five tiers of boxes, 
all perfectly empty. The woodwork of the stage 
is half decayed. There are as many inequalities 
on its surface as in the mosaic pavement of St. Mark's 
church. Can this rotten and grimy expanse, whose 
stiffened traps might be the ' drops' on which doomed 
wretches stand, the ropes round their necks secured 
to the timbers of the flies above, be the same boards 
on which Ellsler, Cerrito, Taglioni, have danced, in 
the midst of a sea of gas, and a shower of bouquets 
and a storm of plaudits? Can this be the place where 
Billington and Catalani, Pasta and Malibran, have 
sung ? Yes ; look behind you ; piled pell-mell against 
the stark damp walls, rigid and faded, like the mum- 
mies of Titans, are the 'flats' and 'wings' and set 
pieces of the place. There are Norma's altar, and 
Amina's bridge, and Zerlina's bedroom, and Don Gio- 
vanni's villa, and Ninus's tomb, and Marta's spinning- 
wheel, and the supper-table of Lucrezia Borgia. I 
follow the nasty old man up and down more dark 
staircases and through more dark corridors, and now 
he unlocks a door, and I stumble into a kind of cell, 
which, the rushlight being held up and waved around, 
turns out to be a proscenium box, with a frescoed 
ceiling, and walls brave with mirrors and damask 
hangings. I have nearly broken my shin over an 
antique fauteuil once splendid in carving, gilding, 
and velvet, but which, on inspection, turns out to 



14 UNDER THE SUN 

have but three legs : and my foot is caught, to my 
almost overthrow, in one of the holes of a once gor- 
geous Turkey carpet. As we pass from the box, the 
nasty old man holds his rushlight to the central 
panel of the door, and there I see a flourishing coat 
of arms, with as many quarterings as there were in 
the scutcheon of the Princess Cunegonde, beloved of 
Candide. But marked with the stigmata of desola- 
tion is all that heraldry. The blazonry has faded, or 
has turned from sable and gules to grubbiness. I 
cannot make out the motto beneath, but it should be 
'Resurgam,' seeing how remarkably like the whole 
affair is to the hatchments set up by cheap under- 
takers, who strive to persuade the natives of Soho or 
Tottenham-court-road in far-off London to allow 
them to conduct their funerals, by heraldically hint- 
ing in their windows that they have already buried 
half Boyle's Court Guide. 

This proscenium box, and the next, and the next, 
all round, from the P. S. to the 0. P. side, pertain to 
the proudest families of the Venetian nobility. The 
house, indeed, belongs to a proprietary, and three- 
fourths of the shareholders are Venetian nobles. On 
many box doors are their spectral achievements 
of arms and their antique titles. Tier above tier, 
vasty gulf of pit, stately crush-room with mirrors yet 
uncracked, and settees of velvet, and ceiling of fresco, 
and flooring of gesso, but all obscure and faded ; cor- 
ridor, and lobby, and ante-chamber, and grand stair- 
case, and vestibule, are haunted by pallid spectres, 



EMPTY BOXES. 



'5 



calling themselves Foscari and Falier, Grimani and 
Contarini, Pesaro and Grani, Papadopoulo and Nani- 
Mocenigo. I return to the stage, and peer into the 
cavern of shadows, sharp sected by that transverse 
ray from the topmost gallery, when, all at once, the 
empty boxes fill ! Yes ; there they are, fair women 
and brave men, in veils, and lace, and silk, and satin, 
and broidered stuffs, with swords, and fans, and 
flashing gems. The great theatre is lighted a giorno. 
The huge chandelier blazes up with countless crystals, 
in the midst of a frescoed firmament; and then the 
orchestra fills too, and I see the conductor, white- 
gloved, waving his baton. I hear the loud bassoon, 
and the crash of the cymbals, and the scraping of 
many fiddles. The footlights flash up, like the demon 
lights in the Freyschiltz. A vision in gauze and silk 
and artificial flowers bounds by me. It is Marie 
Taglioni. Why not ? The Queen of Dance is alive 
still, and it would do her old bones good to come 
and foot a final jig in this place. For this is the 
famous Opera House of La Fenice. Yonder, in his 
box of state, is the King of Italy. Around him 
are the nobility and the beauty, not alone of Venice, 
but of his whole magnificent kingdom — There's no 
such thing ; at least, not yet. There is nothing but 
darkness, and desolation, and empty boxes. If I can 
find e'er a ghost to tenant the state box, it will be a 
phantom in a white coat — the Cavaliere Toggenburg, 
indeed Luogotenente, or civil governor of Venice, 
representing the Austrian Kaiser. I see this ghost 



1 6 UNDER THE SUN 

of Toggenburg continually squabbling with the noble 
shareholders of La Fenice, worrying and baiting 
them; and they, it must be owned, rendering him as 
good as he gives; for the Italians are eminently 
skilled in the art of ingeniously tormenting, and 
these fifty years past the Venetians, if they have 
groaned under tyranny, and suffered misery from the 
presence of the stranger, have at least succeeded in 
making their masters desperately uncomfortable. Sir 
John Falstaff declined to march through Coventry 
with his ragged regiment ; but I could tell of a pen- 
ance far more disagreeable — to be in command of a 
regiment not at all ragged, but beautifully made up, 
and then to be sent to Coventry, and quartered in 
Coventry, and forced to stop in Coventry, year after 
year, to be cut, shunned, loathed, scowled upon, 
scorned, when, at the bottom of their hearts, your 
command is really a very jolly regiment, fond of 
waltzing, and good cheer, and blithesome company. 
Cavalier e Toggenburg wishes La Fenice to be opened, 
in order that everybody may enjoy themselves, and 
that his tight- waisted, white-coated officers may flirt 
with the Venetian ladies, and listen to the opera for 
fourpence-halfpenny, according to the tariff made 
and provided in dear old unsophisticated Deutsch- 
land. But the noble shareholders of La Fenice snarl 
1 No !' If they open the theatre at all, it shall be to 
hang it with black crape, and light it with corpse- 
candles, and intone a mortuary mass there, for Venice, 
laid out on the Lagoons so cold and stark. 4 Come,' 



EMPTY BOXES. 17 



cries Toggenburg, 'let bygones be bygones. Here 
are fifty thousand florins as a subvention from my 
government. Engage an energetic impresario and 
a first-rate troupe. Let us have plenty of masked 
balls next carnival, and the Austrian Hymn, with full 
chorus, on the Kaiser's birthday V The noble share- 
holders will have none of Toggenburg's money. At 
the last carnival ball given here, there were but six 
maskers, and this forlorn half-dozen were dressed and 
paid by the police. From 1859 — the year of hoped- 
for liberation, but, as it turned out, the year of the re- 
newal of the lease of Venetian slavery — unto the year 
1866 La Fenice has been entirely closed, and the spi- 
der has woven his web, and the flea has gone to sleep 
for want of somebody to bite, in these empty boxes. 
Empty, but not, perchance, for ever. Ere these 
lines shall be printed, it is to be hoped and believed 
that the emptiness of La Fenice will have become a 
thing of the past — that the splendid house will be 
really lighted a giorno — that a substantial King of 
Italy will sit in the state box and listen, not to the 
Austrian Kaiser's, but to his own national hymn — 
and that the boxes of this historical theatre will be 
full to overflowing of the noblest blood, the brightest 
beauty, the keenest intellect, and the soundest worth 
of the peninsula. 

Note : — The Canticle of Simeon can be sung now, as regards these ' Empty 
Boxes.' In November 1866 I went to a masquerade at the Fenice Theatre. 
Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy, sat in the state-box listening to the shouts 
of ' Italia Una ' and ' Venezia Libera ' ringing through the house. They only 
wanted Rome in '66. They have got that, now. 

C 



FORM-SICKNESS. 

There is a mysterious disease which the doctors 
find difficult of diagnosis, and from which foreign 
conscripts are said to suffer. They call it nostalgia, 
or le mal du pays — in plainer English, home-sickness. 
We have all read how the band-masters of the Swiss 
regiments in the French service were forbidden to 
play the Ranz des Vaches, lest the pensive chil- 
dren of the mountains, inspired by the national 
melody, should run home too quickly to their cows 
— that is to say, desert. That dogs will pine and 
fret to death for love of the masters they have lost, 
is an ascertained fact ; and I have been told that the 
intelligent and graceful animal, the South American 
llama, if you beat, or overload, or even insult him, 
will, after one glance of tearful reproach from his fine 
eyes, and one meek wail of expostulation, literally 
lay himself down and die. Hence, the legend that 
the bat-men, ere they load a llama, cover his head 
with a poncho, or a grego, or other drapery, in order 
that his susceptibilities may not be wounded by a 
sight of the burden he is to endure : a pretty con- 
ceit vilely transposed into English in a story about a 
cab-horse whose eyes were bandaged by his driver, 



FORM-SICKNESS. 19 



lest lie should be ashamed of the shabbiness of the fare 
who paid but sixpence for less than a mile's drive. 
I was never south of the Isthmus, and never saw a 
llama, save in connection with an overcoat on a cheap 
tailor's show-card; but I am given to understand 
that what I have related is strictly true. 

If the lower animals, then, be subject to nos- 
talgia, and if they be as easily killed by moral as by 
physical ailments, why should humanity be made of 
sterner stuff ? After all, there may be such things as 
broken hearts. "With regard to home-sickness, how- 
ever, I hold that, generally, that malady is caused 
less by absence from home than by the depri- 
vations of the comforts and enjoyments which home 
affords. Scotchmen and Irishmen are to be found 
all over the world, and get on pretty well wherever 
they are ; but a Scot without porridge to sup, or an 
Irishman without buttermilk to drink at breakfast, 
is always more or less miserable. The Englishman, 
accustomed to command, to compel, and to trample 
difficulties under his feet, carries his home-divinities 
with him, and has no sooner set up his tent in Kedar 
than he establishes one supplementary booth for 
making up prescriptions in accordance with the 
ritual of the London Pharmacopoeia, another for the 
sale of pickles, pale ale, and green tea, and a third 
for the circulation of tracts intended to convert the 
foreigners among whom he is to abide. He suffers 
less, perhaps, from home-sickness than any other 
wanderer on the face of the earth ; since he sternly 



20 UNDER THE SUN 

refuses to look upon his retirement from his own 
country as anything but a temporary exile ; he de- 
mands incessant postal communication with home, or 
he will fill the English newspapers with the most vehe- 
ment complaints ; he will often — through the same 
newspapers — carry on controversies, political or reli- 
gious, with adversaries ten thousand miles away; and 
after an absence from England of twenty years, he 
will suddenly turn up at a railway meeting, or in the 
chair at a public dinner ; bully the board ; move the 
previous question ; or, in proposing the toast of the 
evening, quote the statistics of the Cow-cross Infir- 
mary for Calves, as though he had never been out 
of Middlesex. In short, he no more actually expa- 
triates himself than does an attache to an English 
embassy abroad, who packs up Pall-Mali in his port- 
manteau, parts his hair down the middle, and carries 
a slender umbrella— never under any circumstances 
unfurled — in the streets of Teheran. 

But are you aware that there is another form of 
nostalgia which afflicts only Europeans, and, so far 
as I know, is felt only in one part of the world ? Its 
symptoms have not hitherto been described, and I 
may christen it Form-sickness. I should wish to 
have Mr. Ruskin, Mr. Tom Taylor, and Mr. Beresford 
Hope, on the medical board to which I submitted 
my views on this disease ; for it is one architec- 
turally and aesthetically occult. Form-sickness begins 
to attack you after you have resided some time 
— say a couple of months — in the United States of 



FORM-SICKNESS. 21 



America. Its attacks are more acutely felt in the 
North than in the South ; for in the last-named parts 
of the Union there are hg and orange trees, and wild 
jungles and cane brake — some of the elements of 
Form, in fact. It is the monotony of Form, and its 
deficiencies in certain conditions- — that is to say, 
curvature, irregularity, and light and shade — that 
make you sick in the North. I believe that half 
the discomfort and the uneasiness which many edu- 
cated Englishmen experience from a protracted resi- 
dence hi the States, springs from the outrage offered 
to their eye in the shape of perpetual flat surfaces, 
straight vistas, and violent contrasts of colour. 
There are no middle tints in an American landscape. 
In winter, it is white and blue ; in spring, blue and 
green ; in summer, blue and brown ; in autumn, all 
the colours of the rainbow, but without a single 
neutral tint. The magnificent October hues of the 
foliage on the Hudson 'and in Vermont simply dazzle 
and confound you. You would give the world for an 
instant of repose : — for a gray tower, a broken wall, 
a morsel of dun thatch. The immensity of the area 
of vision is too much for a single spectator. Don't 
you remember how Banvard's gigantic panorama of 
the Mississippi used to make us first wonder and then 
yawn ? Banvard is everywhere in the States ; and 
so enormous is the scale of the scenery in this colos- 
sal theatre, that the sparse dramatis personam are all 
but invisible. An English landscape painter would 
scarcely dream of producing a picture, even of cabi- 



22 UNDER THE SUN 



net size, without a group of peasants, or children, or 
a cow or two, or a horse, or at least a flock of geese, 
in some part of the work. You shall hardly look 
half a dozen times out of the window of a carriage 
of an express train in England, without seeing some- 
thing that is Alive. In America, the desolation of 
Emptiness pervades even the longest settled and the 
most thickly populated States. How should it be 
otherwise? How should you wonder at it when, as 
in a score of instances, not more people than inhabit 
Hertfordshire are scattered over a territory as large 
as France ? One of the first things that struck me 
when I saw the admirable works of the American 
landscape painters — of such men as Church and 
Kensett, Bierstadt and Hart — was the absence of 
animal life from their scenes. They seemed to have 
been making sketches of the earth before the birth 
of Adam. 

This vacuous vastness is one of the provocatives 
of Form-sickness. To the European, and especially 
to the Englishman, a country without plenty of 
people, pigs, poultry, haystacks, barns, and cottages, 
is as intolerable as the stage of the Grand Opera 
would be if it remained a whole evening with a 
sumptuously set scene displayed, but without a single 
actor. New England is the state in which, perhaps, 
the accessories of life are most closely concentrated ; 
but even in New England you traverse wastes into 
which it appears to you that the whole of Old Eng- 
land might be dropped with no more chance of 



FORM-SICKNESS, 23 



being found again than has a needle in a pottle of 
hay. But it is when you come to dwell in towns 
that Form-sickness gets its firmest grip of you. In 
a city of three or four hundred thousand inhabitants, 
you see nothing but mere flat surfaces, straight lines, 
right angles, parallel rows of boards, and perpen- 
dicular palings. The very trees lining the streets 
are as straight as walking-sticks. Straight rows of 
rails cut up the roadway of the straight streets. The 
hotels are marble packing-cases, uniformly square, 
and pierced with many quadrangular windows ; the 
railway cars and street omnibuses are exact oblongs ; 
and to crown all, the national flag is ruled in parallel 
crimson stripes, with a blue quadrangle in one corner, 
sown with stars in parallel rows. Philadelphia, from 
its rectangularity, has been called the ' chess-board 
city ;' Washington has been laid out on a plan quite 
as distressingly geometrical ; and nine-tenths of the 
other towns and villages are built on gridiron li nes . 
There are some crooked streets in Boston, and that is 
why Europeans usually show a preference for Boston 
over other Northern American cities ; while in the 
lower part of New York, a few of the thoroughfares 
are narrow, and deviate a little from the inexorable 
straight line. In most cases there is no relaxation 
of the cord of tension. There are no corners, nooks, 
archways, alleys : no refuges, in fact, for light and 
shade. In the State of Yirginia, there is one of the 
largest natural arches in the world ; but in American 
architecture a curved vault is one of the rarest of 



24 UNDER THE SUN 



structures. The very bridges are on piers without 
arches. Signboards and trade effigies, it is true, 
project from the houses, but always at right angles. 
This rigidity of outline makes its mark on the nomen- 
clature and on the manners of the people. The names 
of the streets are taken from the letters of the alpha- 
bet and the numerals in the Ready Reckoner. I 
have lived in G-street. I have lived in West Four- 
teenth, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. Mathe- 
matical calculation is the basis of daily life. You 
are fed at the hotels at stated hours ; and the doors 
of the dining-room are kept locked until within a 
moment of the gong's sounding. At some tables 
d'hote, fifty negro waiters stand mute and immobile 
behind the chairs of two hundred and fifty guests ; 
and at a given signal uncover, with the precision of 
clock-work, one hundred dishes. These are not 
matters of fancy ; they are matters of fact. Routine 
pursues you everywhere : from the theatre to the 
church ; from the fancy fair to the public meeting. 
In the meanest village inn, as in the most palatial 
hotel, there is a travellers' book, in which you are 
bound to enter your name. You may assume an 
alias ; but you must be Mr. Somebody. You cannot 
be, as in England, the 4 stout party in Number Six/ 
or the 'tall gent in the Sun.' You must shake 
hands with every one to whom you are introduced ; 
you must drink when you are asked, and then ask 
the asker to drink — though I am bound to say that 
this strictly mathematical custom has, owing to the 



FORM-SICKNESS. 25 



piteous protests of Europeans, somewhat declined, of 
late. 

If you enter a barber's shop to be shaved, a ne- 
gro hands you a check bearing a number, and you 
must await your turn. When your turn arrives, 
you must sit in a certain position in a velvet-covered 
fauteuil with high legs, and must put your feet up 
on a stool on a level therewith. The barber shaves 
you, not as you like, but as he likes ; powders you, 
strains a napkin over your countenance ; sponges you ; 
shampoos you; pours bay rum and eau-de-Cologne on 
your head ; greases, combs you out ; and ' fixes' you 
generally. The first time I was ever under the 
hands of an American tonsor, I rose as soon as he 
had laid down his razor, and made a move in the 
direction of the washhand basin. He stared at me 
as though I had gone mad. c Hold] on !' he cried, in 
an authoritative accent. 'Hold on ! Guess I'll have 
to wash you up.' That I should be c washed up ' or 
4 fixed,' was in accordance with the mathematical 
code. 

This all but utter absence of variety of form, of 
divergence of detail, of play of light and shade, is pro- 
ductive, in the end, of that petulant and discontented 
frame of mind — of that soreness of spirit — with 
which so many tourists who have visited the Great 
Republic have come at last to regard its civilisation. 
As a rule, the coarser the traveller's organisation — the 
less he cares -about art or literature — the better he 
will get on in America. I met a fellow-countryman 



26 UNDER THE SUN 

once, the son of an English earl, at one of the biggest, 
most mathematical, and most comfortless, of the New 
York hotels, who told me that he should be very well 
content to live there for ten years. ' Why,' he said, 
'you can have five meals a day if you like.' This is the 
kind, of traveller, — the robust hardy strong-stomached, 
youth, fresh from a public school, who goes to Ame- 
rica, and does not grumble. But do you take, not a 
travelled Englishman, but a travelled American — one 
who has been long in Europe, and has appreciated 
the artistic glories of the Continent ; and you will dis- 
cover that he finds it almost impossible to live in his 
own country, or ' board' at an American hotel. Every 
continental city has its colony of refined Americans, 
good patriots and stanch republicans, but who are 
absolutely afraid to go back, to their native land. 
They dread the mathematical system. Those who, for 
their families' or their interests' sake, are compelled 
to abide in the States, live at hotels conducted, not on 
the American, but on the European system — that is 
to say, where they can dine, breakfast, or sup, not as 
the landlord likes, but as they themselves like. Those 
who are wealthy, shut themselves up in country- 
houses, or splendid town mansions, surrounded by 
books, and pictures, and statues, and tapestry, and 
coins from Europe, until their existence is almost ig- 
nored by their countrymen. In no country in the 
world are so many men of shining talents, of noble 
mind, of refined taste, buried alive as in the United 
States. 



FORM-SJCKNESS. 27 

That which I call the 'Mathematical System' is only 
another name for a very stringent and offensive social 
tyranny ; and, did we not remember that humanity 
is one mass of inconsistencies and contradictions, it 
would be difficult to understand how this social des- 
potism could be made compatible with the existence 
of an amount of political liberty never before equalled 
in this world. Until 1861, the American citizen was 
wholly and entirely free ; and now that the only pre- 
text for the curtailment of his liberties has disap- 
peared, he will enter upon, it is to be hoped, a fresh 
lease of freedom, as whole and unrestricted as of yore. 
How far the social despotism spoken of has extended 
would be almost incredible to those who have not 
resided in America. 'Whatever you do,' said an 
American to me on the first day of my landing in 
the States, ' don't live in a boarding-house where you 
are to be treated as one of the family. They'll worry 
you to death by wanting to take care of your morals/ 
To have one's morals taken care of is a very excellent 
thing ; but, as a rule, you prefer to place the curator- 
ship thereof in the hands of your parents and guar- 
dians, or of your ghostly director, or, being of ma- 
ture age, of yourself. ' Taking care of morals' is apt 
to degenerate into petty impertinence and espionage. 
One of the most eminent of living sculptors in New 
York told me that for many years he experienced the 
greatest difficulty in pursuing the studies incidental 
to, and indeed essential to his attaining excellence in 

7 o 

his profession, owing to the persistent care taken of 



28 UNDER THE SUN 

his morals by the lady who officiated as housekeeper 
in the chambers where he lived. It must be pre- 
mised that these chambers formed part of a building 
specially erected for the accommodation of artists^ 
and with a view to their professional requirements. 
Our sculptor had frequent need of the assistance of 
female models, and the c Janitress,' as the lady house- 
keeper was called, had a virtuously indignant objec- 
tion to young persons who posed as Yenuses or 
Hebes, in the costume of the mythological period, for 
a dollar an hour. She could only be induced by the 
threat of dismissal from the proprietor of the studio 
building to grant admission to the models at all ; even 
then she would await their exit at her lodge gate, 
and abuse them as they came down-stairs. Much 
more acclimatised to models was the good sister of 
William Etty, who used to seek out his Venuses for 
him; but a transition state of feeling was that of 
the wife of Nollekens, the sculptor, who, whenever 
her husband had a professional sitter, and the day 
was very cold, used to burst into the studio with 
a basin in her hand, crying: 'You nasty, good-for- 
nothing hussey, here's some hot mutton broth for 
you.' 

To recapitulate a little. Form- sickness is the un- 
satisfied yearning for those broken lines, irregular 
forms, and infinite gradations of colour — reacting as 
those conditions of form invariably do on the man- 
ners and characteristics of the people — which are 
only to be met with in very old countries. However 



FORM-SICKNESS. 29 



expensively and elegantly dressed a man may be, he 
is apt to feel uncomfortable in a bran-new hat, a 
bran-new coat and trowsers, and bran-new boots 
and gloves ; and I believe that if he were compelled 
to put on a bran-new suit every morning, he would 
hang himself before a month was over, and send his 
abhorred garments to Madame Tussaud's, to swell 
the wardrobe in the Chamber of Horrors. The sensa- 
tion of entire novelty is one inseparable from the 
outward aspect of America. You can smell the paint 
and varnish; the glue is hardly dry. The reasons 
for this are very obvious. American civilisation is 
an independent and self-reliant entity. It has no con- 
nections, or ties, or foregathering s with any predeces- 
sors on its own soil. It is not the heir of long en- 
tailed patrimony. It is, like Rodolph of Hapsburg, 
the first of its race. It has slain and taken possession. 
In Great Britain we have yet Stonehenge and some 
cairns and cromlechs to remind us of the ancient 
Britons' acts; but in the settled j)arts of the United 
States, apart from the Indian names of some towns 
and rivers, there remains not the remotest vestige to 
recall the existence of the former possessors of the 
soil. There are yet outlying districts, millions of 
acres square, where Red Indians hunt, and fight, and 
steal, and scalp; but American civilisation marches 
up, kills or deports them — at all events, entirely 'im- 
proves' them off the face of the land. They leave no 
trace behind; and the bran-new civilisation starts up 
in a night, like a mushroom. Where yesterday was 



3 o UNDER THE SUN 

a wigwam, to-day is a Doric meeting-house, also a 
bank, and a grand pianoforte; where yesterday the 
medicine-man muttered his incantations, to-morrow an 
advertising corn-cutter opens his shop ; and in place 
of a squaw, embroidering moccasins, and cudgelled 
hy the drunken brave, her spouse, we have a tight- 
laced young lady, with a chignon and a hooped skirt, 
taking academical degrees, and talking shrilly about 
Woman's Rights.* A few years since, the trapper and 
pioneer race formed a transition stage between the 
cessation of barbarism and the advent of civilisation. 
The pioneer was a simple-minded man ; and so soon 
as a clearing grew too civilised for him, he would 
shoulder his hatchet and rifle, and move farther out 
into the wilds. I have heard of one whose signal for 
departure was the setting up of a printing press in 
his settlement. 4 Those darned newspapers,' he re- 
marked, ' made one's cattle stray so.' But railway 
extension, and the organisation in the Atlantic cities 
of enormous caravans of emigrants, are gradually 
thinning the ranks of the pioneers. In a few years, 
Natty Bumppo, Leatherstocking, the Deerslayer, the 
Pathfinder, will be legendar}^ Civilisation moves 
now en masse. There is scarcely any advanced guard. 
Eew skirmishers are thrown, out. The main body 
swoops down on the place to be occupied, and civil- 
ises it in one decided charge. 

It may be advantageous to compare such a sud- 

* And I wish that she would talk more shrilly still, all over the world, 
until those Eights are granted. 



FORM-SICKNESS. 31 



den substitution of a settled community for a howling 
wilderness, with the slow and tentative growth of our 
home surroundings. European civilisation resembles 
the church of St. Eustache at Paris, in whose ex- 
terior Gothic niches and pinnacles, Byzantine arches, 
Corinthian columns, Composite cornices, and Renais- 
sance doorways, are all jumbled together. Every 
canon of architectural taste is violated; but the 
parts still cohere; a very solid facade still rears its 
head ; and, at a certain distance, its appearance is not 
inharmonious. At Cologne, in Germany, they will 
point out to you an ancient building, here a bit of 
Lombard, here a morsel of florid Gothic, here some 
unmistakable Italian, and here ten feet of genuine 
old Roman wall. There are many Christian churches 
in Italy whose walls are supported by columns taken 
from Pagan temples. The entire system, physical as 
well as moral, has been the result of growth upon 
growth, of gradual intercalation and emendation, of 
perpetual cobbling and piecing and patching; and 
although at last, like Sir John Cutler's silk stockings, 
which his maid darned so often with worsted that no 
part of the original fabric remained, the ancient foun- 
dations may have become all but invisible, they are 
still latent, and give solidity to the superstructure. 
We look upon the edifice, indeed, as we would on 
something that has taken root : — that has something to 
rest upon. "We regard it as we -would that hoary old 
dome of St. Peter's at Rome. We know how long 
it took to build, and we trust that it will endure 



32 UNDER THE SUN 



for ever. The bran-new civilisation we are apt to 
look at more in the light of a balloon. It is very 
astonishing. We wonder how ever it contrived to 
rise so high, and how long it will be before it comes 
down again ; and we earnestly hope that it will not 
burst. 

It is not necessary to avow any kind of partisan 
predilection for one phase of civilisation as against 
another. It is sufficient to note the fact : that Euro- 
peans the least prejudiced, and the most ardent ad- 
mirers of the political institutions of the United 
States, very soon grow fretful and uneasy there, and 
are unable to deny, when they come back, that the 
country is not an elegant or a comfortable one to 
look upon. I attribute this solely to aesthetic causes. 
I do not believe that Englishmen grumble at America 
because the people are given to expectoration, or 
1 guessing,' or ' calculating,' or trivialities of that kind. 
Continental Europeans expectorate quite as freely as 
the Americans, and for rude cross questioning of 
strangers, I will back a German against the most in- 
quisitive of New Englanders. It is in the eye that 
the mischief lies. It is the bran-new mathematical 
outline of Columbia that drives the Englishman into 
Form-sickness, and ultimately to the disparagement 
and misrepresentation of a very noble country. In 
many little matters of detail, American manners dif- 
fer from ours ; but in the aggregate we are still one 
family. Americans speak our language — frequently 
with far greater purity and felicity of expression than 



FORM-SICKNESS. 



33 



we ourselves do — they read our books, and we are 
very often glad and proud to read theirs. They have 
a common inheritance with us in the historic memo- 
ries we most prize. If they would only round off 
their corners a little ! If they would only give us a 
few crescents and ovals in lieu of c blocks' ! If they 
would only remember that the circle as well as the 
rectangle is a figure in mathematics, and that the 
curvilinear is, after all, the Line of Beauty ! 



D 



UNDER THE GUNS OF THE MORRO. 

Theee used some years ago to be a little tobacconist's 
shop, somewhere between Pali-Mall and Duncannon- 
street, by the sign of the Morro Castle. It was such 
a little shop, and it smelt so strongly of cedar and of 
the Indian weed, that itself was not unlike a cigar- 
box. Here I used to think a threepenny cigar about 
the greatest luxury in which a young man of pleasure 
could indulge ; but a luxury only to be ventured upon 
at the occurrence of solemn festivals, and when the 
treasures of the mines of Potosi, to the extent of 
a few shillings, lay loose in one's waistcoat-pocket. 
There were threepenny cigars in th ose days, and they 
were delicious. I am afraid that the manufacture has 
ceased, or that the threepennies have lost their fla- 
vour, for Ensign and Lieutenant Dickeystrap, of the 
Guards, declares that you cannot get anything fit to 
smoke under ninepence, and that a really tolerable 
* weed ' will ' stand you in ' eighteenpence. Prince 
Portunatus, they say, gives half-a-crown apiece for 
his Regalias. The Morro Castle, however, did a 
very modest but, I believe, remunerative business 
in cigars at from threepence to sixpence each. 
Well do I remember courtly old Mr. Alcachofado, 
the proprietor of the Morro — always in the same 



UNDER THE GUNS OF THE MORRO. 35 

well-buttoned frock-coat, always with the same tall 
shiny hat with the broad turned-up brim — always 
puffing at, apparently, the same stump of a choice 
Londres. It was well worth while laying out three- 
pence at the Morro Castle; for, in consideration 
of that modest investment, you were treated, for 
at least fi.ve minutes, like a peer of the realm. Mr. 
Alcachofado himself selected your cigar, and, if you 
approved of it, snipped off the end in a little patent 
machine, and presented it to you with a grave bow. 
You proposed to light it; but this Mr. Alcachofado 
would by no means permit. He drew a splint from a 
stack in a japanned stand, kindled it at the gas-jet, 
and with another bow handed it to you. If you 
wished to fill the heart of Mr. Alcachofado with an- 
guish, and to pass in his eyes for a person of the very 
worst breeding, you would, when the splint had served 
your turn, cast it on the floor, and trample it under 
foot. I have seen the proprietor of the Morro glare at 
people who did this, as though he would have dearly 
liked to take off his curly -brimmed hat and fling it at 
their heads. Regular customers knew well the eti- 
quette of the Morro, which was gently to blow out the 
tiny flame of the splint, and place it horizontally on 
the top of the fasces in the japanned tin box. Then 
you bowed to Mr. Alcachofado, and he bowed in re- 
turn ;^and, taking a seat, if you liked, on a huge cigar 
chest, you proceeded to smoke the calumet of peace. 
Did I say that for five minutes you would be treated 
like a nobleman ? You might softly kick your heels, 



36 UNDER THE SUN 

and meditate on the transitory nature of earthly 
things, in that snug little shop for nearly half an hour. 
Threepenny cigars lasted five-and-twenty minutes in 
those days. Austere personages of aristocratic mien 
patronised Mr. Alcachofado. They looked like County 
Members, masters in Chancery, Charity Commissioners. 
They looked as though they belonged to clubs. They 
called the proprietor Alcatchanything, without the 
Mr. He was gravely courteous to them, but not 
more so than to humbler patrons. I remember that 
he always took in the second edition of the Globe. 
I have, in my time, bespoken it, I think, not without 
fear and trembling, from a Baronet. They were af- 
fable creatures, those exalted ones, and talked sedate 
commonplaces about the House, and the crops, and 
the revenue, until I used to fancy I had land and 
beeves and a stake in the country. There was only 
one absolutely haughty customer. He wore a spencer 
and gaiters, and sometimes swore. He smoked a 
costlier cigar than the ordinary race of puffers ; and 
one had to rise from the big cigar chest while Mr. 
Alcachofado, a shining bunch of keys in hand, like a 
discreet sacristan, unlocked this treasure-coffer, and 
produced regalias of price. Yet even this haughty 
man in the spencer gave me a bow once when I 
brushed by him in the lobby of the House, where I 
had been waiting two hours and a quarter on a, night 
when Sir Robert Peel was ' up,' in the vain hope of 
getting into the strangers' gallery with an Irish 
member's order. The haughty man thought he knew 



UNDER THE GUNS OF THE MORRO. 37 

me. I felt so proud that I had my hair cut the very 
next day, and determined, like Mr. Pepys, to 'go 
more like myself.' A grave company we were at 
Mr. Alcachofado' s. Now and then, on Opera nights, 
dandies in evening dress would stroll in to smoke a 
cigarette. There was great scandal one evening — it 
was Grisi's benefit — when a tall young man, with a 
white cravat and a tawny moustache, ordered Mr. 
Alcachofado to l open him a bottle of soda, and look 
sharp.' Those were his very words. There was a 
commotion among the customers. Soda-water ! Was 
this a tobacconist's and fancy stationer's in the Clap- 
ham-road ? As well might you have asked the beadle 
of St. George's, Hanover- square, for hot whisky-toddy 
between psalm and sermon. Mr. Alcachofado, under 
the circumstances, was calm. He gave the tall young 
desperado one look, to wither him, and in slow and 
measured accents, not devoid of a touch of sarcasm, 
replied, C I sell neither soda-water, nor ginger-beer, 
nor walking-sticks, nor penny valentines, sir.' The 
customers grimly chuckled at this overwhelming re- 
buke. There was nothing left for the tall young man 
but to withdraw ; but, as I was nearest the door, I 
am constrained to state that as he lounged out he re- 
marked that the ■ old guy,' meaning Mr. Alcachofado, 
4 seemed doosid crusty.' 

He is gone, this Grandison of the counter and till 
— gone, seemingly, with most other professors of the 
grande maniere. The modern tobacconist is loud 
voiced and obtrusive ; proposes to send you home a 



38 UNDER THE SUN 

box of the ' Cabana Kings ' of which you have scarcely 
tasted one ; and, ere you have been in his shop 
five minutes, gives you a tip for the Two Thousand 
Guineas. This was not Mr. Alcachofado's way of 
doing business. By-the-by, why wasn't he a Senor ? 
But he betrayed no symptoms of Iberian extraction ; 
and when, seeing an engraving of the Morro Castle 
itself on one of his cedar boxes, I strove to draw him 
out, and asked him if the picture resembled the place 
itself, he replied, ambiguously, that he had not visited 
foreign parts — adding, after a moment's pause, that he 
did not approve of their ways. Whence his Spanish 
name, then ? Whence anybody's name? I dealt with 
a greengrocer once who had the self-same appellation 
as the last prime minister of Constantine Paheologus. 
How Mr. Alcachofado had come to enter the tobacco 
business — unless he was a retired Custom-house 
officer — was to me a mystery. There was a dim 
something about him that always led you to fancy 
that before he had dealt in cigars, he had been in 
the Church. 

The Morro Castle had to me always a fascinating 
sound. There were three boys at the school at 
Turnham-green, where I completed my education — 
that is to say, where on the last day of my last 6 half 
I began to discover that I didn't know anything — 
three Spanish Creole boys, all hailing from Havana. 
They kept very close together, and aloof from the rest 
of the school, and wrapped themselves up in Castilian 
pride as in cloaks ; indeed, one of them subsequently 



UNDER THE GUNS OF THE MORRO. 39 

admitted to me, that, on leaving Cuba, his papa had 
given him two special cautions : to beware of the 
' Estrangeros,' and not to show them — 'ensefiar' — 
the Spanish tongue. We, too, were rather shy of 
them at first ; for there was a received tradition 
among us, that all foreign boys, when moved to anger, 
stabbed. Yery unjustly we christened the youngest 
Creole, Dagger; his little brother, Bodkin; and the 
third, who was a tall lean lad with glittering eyes, 
Carving-knife. I think a good deal of nonsense — as 
could be proved by the police reports and the Old 
Bailey sessions papers — has been talked about the 
' un-English ' nature of the crime of stabbing. It is 
not the custom to carry deadly weapons on the person 
in England, for the reason that the laws for the "pro- 

O / jl 

tection of life and property are very stringent, and, in 
the main, efficiently administered; but 1 never heard of 
a drunken savage Englishman, who could get hold of 
a knife in a row, icho icouldnH use it; nor, as regards 
the softer sex, are the biting off the nose of an adver- 
sary, and the searing of her face with a red-hot poker 
quite ' un-English' or un-Irish practices. 

Our schoolmaster, who was an eccentric instructor, 
half Pestalozzi andhalf Philosopher Square, had an idea 
that all Spanish children were weaned upon tobacco, 
and absolutely permitted these three Creole lads to 
smoke : on condition, however, that they should not 
light up their papelitos until night-time, when the 
other boys went to bed. How we used to envy them, 
as, marching in Indian file to our dormitories, we could 



40 UNDER THE SUN. 

see those favoured young Dons enrolling their squares 
of tissue-paper, preparatory to a descent into the play- 
ground and a quiet smoke ! The demoralisation among 
the juvenile community, caused by this concession to 
Spanish customs, was but slight. One or two of us 
tried surreptitious weeds on half-holiday afternoons ; 
but the Widow Jones in Chiswick-lane did not keep 
quite such choice brands in stock as did Mr. Alcacho- 
faclo of the Morro Castle ; and Nemesis, in the shape 
of intolerable nausea, very soon overtook us. It is 
astounding, at fourteen years of age, how much agony 
of heart, brain, and stomach, can be got out of one 
penny Pickwick. Pestalozzi Square, Ph. Dr., very 
wisely refrained from excessive severity on this head. 
He made it publicly known that a boy detected in 
smoking would not necessarily be caned, but that on 
three alternate clays for a week following the discov- 
ery of his offence, he would be supplied at 1 p.m. 
with a clean tobacco-pipe and half an ounce of prime 
shag in lieu of dinner. We had very few unlicensed 
smokers after this announcement. 

It was my singular good fortune, ere I left the 
tutelage of the sage of Turnham-green, to be ad- 
mitted to the acquaintance, and almost to the inti- 
macy, of the three Creoles. I had somewhat of a 
Spanish-sounding name and lineage, and they deemed 
me not wholly to belong to the 'Estrangeros ;' at 
all events, they talked to me, - showed ' me some Cas- 
tilian which was subsequently very useful to me, 
and told me as much as I hungered and thirsted 



UNDER THE GUNS OF THE MORRO. 41 

to know about the Morro Castle. For, long before I 
began to deal with Mr. Alcachofado, I had pondered 
over a picture of this fortress, and mused as to what 
its real aspect might be. So, softly and gratefully as 
dried mint falls upon pea-soup, did the tales of these 
Spanish boys about the rich strange island of Cuba fall 
upon my willing ear. I saw it in its golden prime, 
all sugar and spice, and redolent of coffee-berries and 
the most fragrant of cigars. I basked in the rich full 
light of the tropical sun. I saw the caballero gravely 
pacing on his Andalusian jennet ; the lazy negro paus- 
ing as he cut the sugar-cane to suck the luscious tubes ; 
the senora in her mantilla; the senorita with her fan. 
I revelled in a voluptuous dream of the torrid clime, 
where you ate fifteen oranges before breakfast, and a 
plateful of preserved cocoa-nut at breakfast; where 
you never failed to take a siesta in your hammock 
during the noontide heats ; where full evening costume 
consisted of a suit of white linen, a Panama hat, and 
a guitar; and where, with any little circumspection, 
you might win the hundred thousand dollar prize in 
the lottery. I longed to go to Havana, or 4 the Havan- 
nah,' as it was termed in our time. Who has not so 
longed to visit strange countries when he was young, 
and imaginative, and had no money ? Byron's words 
used to drive us crazy to see Sestos, and Abydos, and 
Athens. Anastasius, or the Memoirs of a Greek — 
why does not some one republish that pearl of pica- 
roon romance ? — made us tremble with eagerness to 
see the Fanal of Constantinople and the Bagnio of 



42 UNDER THE SUN 



Sm}Tna ; and, later in the day, Eothen sent us wild to 
catch a gazelle, and bathe in the Dead Sea, and read 
the Quarterly Review in the Valley of Jehoshaphat. I 
cannot say the same of Gil Bias. Unsurpassed as Le 
Sage's great work is, as a feat of story-telling, it is to 
me singularly deficient in local colour. The Robbers' 
Cave might be in Italy, or in England in the clays of 
Robin Hood. The Archbishop of Granada might be 
resident at Barchester Towers. I know Doctor San- 
grado. He lives in Bloomsbury. Xow Don Quixote, 
on the contrary, is odorous of the real Spanish garlic 
from the first to the last page. But Don Quixote 
is not a boys' book, whatever you may say. It is 
a book for men. 

Well, the great whirling teetotum of life spun 
round, and one day it fell, spent, athwart a spot on 
the map marked c United States of America.' I packed 
up my bundle, and crossed the Atlantic ; but with no 
more idea of visiting Havana than I have, at this 
present writing, of going to Afghanistan. I am not 
ashamed to confess that I had but a very dim notion 
indeed respecting the topographical relation in which 
2sew York stood towards the Island of Cuba. I 
think there must have been something wrong in the 
manner they taught boys geography in our time ; 
it was too sectional; you were made to swallow Mer- 
cator's Projection in isolated scraps of puzzles; and if 
your eye wandered towards the Gulf of Mexico when 
it should have been intent on the Bay of Fundy, 
they boxed your ears. We used to learn all about 



UNDER THE GUNS OF THE MORRO. 43 

the West Indies, and Wilberforce, and " Clarkson, and 
Granville Sharpe ; but no stress was laid on the fact 
that Cuba, and St. Domingo, and St. Thomas, were 
likewise West India Islands ; and they were never 
mentioned in connection with North America. I 
think Admiral Christopher Columbus, or the Spanish 
Consilio de las Indias, must take some of the blame 
in this matter. What on earth made them call those 
American, or rather Columbian islands, Indian ones? 
I have never surmounted the early perplexity which 
beset me on the subject, and to this day it is to me 
incomprehensible why the passage from Halifax to 
Bermuda should be such a short and easy one; you 
ought to go round the Cape, surely, to the Indies. 

Round again went the teetotum, and the tip of its 
tiny staff pointed to the Southern Atlantic. 4 Havana' 
was inscribed on the uppermost facet, xlgain I packed 
my bundles, and, taking passage in a United States 
mail steamer, sped past Charleston, the which luckless 
city General Gillmore was then actively engaged in 
warming with Greek fire, and which Northern 
preachers were cheerfully and charitably comparing 
every Sunday to Sodom and Gomorrah. On the 
third clay we were close on the Gulf Stream, and the 
usual feat of parlour, or rather gangway magic, was 
performed by a boatswain's mate, who lowered a 
bucket of water over the side, and bade us plunge 
our hands into it. It was cold as ice. Twenty min- 
utes afterwards he lowered the bucket again, drew up 
more water, and bade us dip. We did, and the water 



44 UNDER THE SUN 



was tepid, almost warm. There was an increase of 
thirty degrees in temperature, and we were in that 
stream which an irate American politician once 
threatened to dam up and divert from the shores of 
England, thus leaving us ' out in the cold/ and freez- 
ing perfidious Albion to the glacial mean of Spitz- 
bergen. 

Three times — I do not understand the mysteries 
of navigation — we crossed the Gulf Stream. We 
skirted the coast of Florida so closely that we could 
see the pines that made a grim horizon to that 
swampy shore — so closely, that you might almost 
fancy you could see Secession in arms shaking its 
fists at the Stars and Stripes we carried. All this 
country was, at the time to which I refer, a land 
tabooed and accursed in Northern eyes. It was the 
coast of a rebellious state. Below St. Augustines, 
half way between that and Key West, we saw the 
coral reefs and the Everglades. Coral reefs, 1 may 
observe, do not make so pretty a show on the coast 
of Florida as the material does, in the form of brace- 
lets and earrings, in Mr. Phillips's windows in Cock- 
spur-street. In fact, a prudent shipmaster keeps as 
far away from the coral reefs as he possibly can. 

We should also have sighted Cape Florida Light 
and Carysfort Light; but the Confederates having 
carefully put the lights out, to favour blockade run- 
ning and perplex their enemies as far as they could, 
it was rather ticklish navigation after sunset. How- 
ever, it is but a few days' voyage from New York to 



UNDER THE GUNS OF THE MORRO. 45 

Cuba, and we had a tight ship and great confidence in 
our captain. Occasionally, when the look-out man 
signalled a sail, there was a slight exhibition of ner- 
vousness among the passengers. The loyal immedi- 
ately assumed the stranger to be the Alabama — not 
yet scuttled by the Kearsage off Cherbourg — and in- 
dulged in dire forebodings that within two hours the 
steamer's chronometers would be ticking in the cabin 
of Captain Raphael Semmes, C.S.A., the ship burnt 
or bonded, and themselves carried off to some port 
in the White Sea or the Indian Archipelago, thence 
to find their way to their destination as best they 
could. The disloyal, of whom I am afraid we had a 
considerable proportion among our passengers, gene- 
rally jumped at the conclusion that the speck on the 
horizon, momentarily growing larger, was a Yankee 
gunboat, specially detached from the blockading 
squadron to overhaul us. What sudden declarations 
there were of ' whole hog' Union sentiments ! — 
what divings into state-roms, there presumably to 
make such little matters as revolvers, Confederate 
commissions, and rebel mail-bags, snug! The cap- 
tain was a discreet man, Union to the backbone, but 
not inveterate against the opposite party. We had one 
passenger on board who, for all the privacy in which 
he kept, and the very large cloak in which he wrapped 
himself, was unmistakably, inside and out, Southern 
Greyback and Secesh. To this gentleman in political 
difficulties, I heard our worthy captain remark one 
morning, ' My Christian friend, I'll tell you what it is : 



46 UNDER THE SUN 

as soon as we get inside the Morro I should advise you 
to clear out of one of the starboard ports, and never 
stop running till we've got steam up again. The smell 
of Uncle Sam's mail -bags ain't good for you. It ain't, 
indeed. ' The which, I take it, was very sensible, and 
at the same time very kind-hearted counsel. 

All this time, while we were eating and drinking, 
and lounging and smoking, and dawdling over books 
and newspapers, and card-playing, and listening to 
the grand pianoforte in the saloon, which was exeni- 
plarily punished at least a dozen times a day by Mrs. 
Colonel Spankie and Miss Alexandra McStinger, lady 
passengers — and pretending that the time hung heav- 
ily on our hands, when, to tell the truth, sluggards as 
we were, we revelled in our laziness — there was going 
on all around us, and to a certain extent in our very 
selves, a curiously phenomenal process called Transfor- 
mation. You have read poor Hawthorne's delicious 
book; you have readi^ms^ (with an English c crib';) 
you have seen Lucas Cranach's picture of the Fontaine 
de Jouvence in the Berlin gallery ? "Well, we and our 
surroundings had become transformed. I had left 
New York in the middle of January, and in the rigid- 
est throes of a Northern winter. The snow lay thick 
in the streets. They were skating on the lake in the 
Central Park. There were midnight sleighing parties 
on the Bloomingdale-road. The steamers on the North 
river had frozen fringes on the water-lines of their 
hulls, like the callous raggedness thrown out from 
the ends of a fractured bone ; and you could see the 



UNDER THE GUNS OF THE MORRO. 47 

very shapes of the ferry-boats' keels cut out in the 
quickly parting ice that gathered about the landing- 
place. I had left Pier No. Seventy-seven, bottom of 
I forget which street, swathed in furs and woollens, 
and shivering through all my wrappers. I heaped 
mountains of extraneous coverlets in my berth that 
night. It was not quite so cold next day. On the 
third it was positively mild. On the fourth morning, 
taking my ante-breakfast walk on deck, I remarked 
with astonishment that I was clad in a full suit of the 
very thinnest nankeen, and that I wore a very broad- 
brimmed straw hat. Nankeen white linen, or thin blue 
flannel, was the only wear among my fellow-passen- 
gers, and the ladies had become positive Zephyrs. The 
smallest children on board testified very conclusively 
indeed as to the weather having become warmer, by 
removing their apparel altogether, unless restrained 
by parents or nurses; and then I remembered that I had 
kicked off all the bed-clothes during the night, and 
had had troubled dreams bearing on iced cider-cup. 
We had all become Transformed. Where yesterday 
was a fire shovel, to-day was a fan. We looked no 
more on a gray angry wintry ocean, but on a summer 
sea. It seemed ten years ago since there had been 
any winter; and yet that was only the day before 
yesterday. 

For four -and -twenty hours did we sigh and 
swelter, and complain of the intolerable heat, and 
yet think it the most delightful thing in the world. 
We dined at four o'clock, as usual ; but the purser, 



48 UNDER THE SUN. 

if he contracted for our meals, must have made 
rather a good thing of our repast that day. The 
first course was scarcely over, before seven-eighths 
of the diners rushed on deck to see the highlands of 
Cuba. Yonder, rather blue and indistinct as yet, 
was the Pan of Matanzas. That day we dined no 
more ; but, there being a ' bar' on deck, forward, with 
a New England bar -keeper of many virtues and 
accomplishments in his profession, sundry cheerful 
spirits adjourned to his little caboose, and, with 
steadfast and smiling conviviality of countenance, 
did 'liquor up' on Bourbon and old Rye, till the Pan 
of Matanzas, to which we had come so close that it 
was clearly visible to the naked eye, must have been, 
to the convivialists, more indistinct than ever. 

We were yet many miles from Havana; but by 
the help of strong opera-glasses, and lively conver- 
sation, and a glorious tropical sunset, they were 
the shortest miles I ever knew, by land or sea. 
Coasting along the northern shore of Cuba from 
Matanzas westward, by high hills and white houses 
which, without any intervening beach or sand, came 
right down to the water's edge, like the castle - 
crowned vine-hills of the Rhine, we sighted, just be- 
fore sundown, the Morro Castle itself: a great mass 
of dun -coloured rock, and tower, and battlement, 
and steep, of which the various parts seem to have 
grown into one another, like the rocky convent of 
the Sagra di San Miguel, so that you could scarcely 
tell which was castle and which crag. From its 



UNDER THE GUNS OF THE MORRO. 49 

summit floats the flag of the Most Catholic Queen, 
blood-red and gold; and in front, and in the sea, 
like a tall grenadier on guard, stands the Morro 
Lighthouse. No Confeds have put that out. We 
pass between the Morro and a promontory called the 
Punta, and can see a harbour, forested with masts, 
and a city all glancing and twinkling with light. 
We revel in thoughts of landing ; of abandoning our 
keys to a commissionnaire, and leaving the examina- 
tion of our luggage until the morrow morning; of 
rushing to an hotel ; of bathing and supping, and 
going to the Tacon Theatre, or eating ices at La 
Dominica, after the band had done playing on the 
Plaza de Armas. Bless you, we know all about 
Havana by this time. I seem to have been familiar 
with the place for years. Did not Dagger and Bod- 
kin and eke Carving-knife tell me all about it? But 
the Captain of the Port of San Cristobal de la Habana 
is a great man — a very great man, under correction 
of the Captain-General Dulce, be it spoken — and his 
laws are stringent. The sunset gun has been fired; 
the last notes of the warning trumpets have died 
away from the ramparts. We are just permitted to 
snuggle into the outer harbour ; but there is no 
landing for us until six a.m., and under the guns of 
the Morro we are bound to remain all night. A very 
few years ago, even this privilege would not have 
been granted us, and we should have been forced to 
turn our heads seaward, and anchor in the roads. 
It was tantalising, certainly ; but still it was 

E 



50 UNDER THE SUN 

exceedingly pleasant, and. no one felt inclined to 
grumble. It was something, at least, to know that 
the huo;e engines were at rest, and that we should 
hear their churning and grinding, their panting and 
trembling, no more, until, like Poor Jack in Dibdin s 
song, we ' went to sea again. 7 So all the call was 
for coffee and cigars; and we idled about the deck, 
and speculated on what might be going on in the 
innumerable tenements in which the lights, now dim, 
now bright, were shining. Then out came the moon, 
like a great phantom of greenish, white, and spread 
her arms right over the city of Havana. We could 
make out the hoary towers of the cathedral, and the 
church where is the tomb of Christopher Colombus ; 
we could see the long slanting shadows cast by the 
beetling guns of the Morro on the rubbled walls. 
Boats came and went on the glassy waters of the 
harbour. There were lights in the port-holes of the 
ships too. What was going on there, I wonder ? 
Skipper drinking cold rum-and-water. First officer 
playing a quiet rubber with the surgeon, the super- 
cargo, and dummy. Purser making up his accounts; 
foremast men drinking Sweethearts and Wives, in the 
round-house. Everybody glad that the voyage is 
over, save, perhaps, that poor Northern lady in the 
captain's state-room, propped up with pillows, affec- 
tionately tended by that little band of Sisters of 
Charity who are going to New Orleans, and who is 
dying of consumption. Even she, perchance, is grate- 
ful that the restless engines no longer moan and 



UNDER THE GUNS OF THE MORRO. 



5i 



labour, and that to-morrow she may land, and die in 
peace. 

As ' good nights' and ' buenas noches' cross each 
other in the harbour, you begin to wish you could 
find a friend to take a second in i All's well.' For 
the waning moon now deserts you, and only the 
twinkling lights shine out from the black masses of 
buildings. The lights, too, are growing fewer, and 
ever since you came into port — which was at about 
eight o'clock — you have heard from time to time 
gusts of wild martial music from the shore. These 
gusts, the captain tells you, are the strains of the 
military bands playing in the Plaza de Armas. Hark ! 
a most tremendous crash! then what a quaint }^et 
plaintive flow of melody. Is that a Seguidilla, or a 
Cubana, or one of the hundred variations of the Jota 
Aragonese? Now, comes another crash; the cym- 
bals have it clearly; the bassoons have given out; 
'tis the big drum that is making all the running; 
the cymbals are nowhere; bah, it is a dead heat, 
and the grosse caisse and the plated dishes come 
in together. Now, the .sounds have changed their 
direction. The soldiers are marching home to their 
barracks. Now, the wild sounds grow fainter ; now, 
they die away altogether, and Havana is left to 
silence and to me. 

I walked the deck until long after the ship was 
wrapped in darkness — all save the illumined binna- 
cles and my fellow deck-walkers' cigar-tips. It was 



not at all the kind of night for going to bed. It 



52 UNDER THE SUN 

was, the rather, a night on which to stroll and stroll, 
and indulge in the deleterious habit of smoking, and 
wonder how many broadsides from the guns of the 
Morro it would take to blow you out of the water, 
and try to remember one of the movements of the 
Jota Aragonese, and at last, softly stealing into the 
saloon, and quite disdaining state-room berth, to 
fling yourself on a couch, and dream till morning of 
Mr. Alcachofado and the three young Creoles of 
Turnham-green. 

Hasta Manana, In my next I will relate some- 
thing cogent as to what ' Manana ' means in this part 
of the world. 



THE HUMOUES OF HAVANA. 

The morning, you may be sure, did not find me a 
sluggard on my couch in the saloon. Never rose a 
lark, or a landscape-painter on his first sketching-tour 
in Wales, with more alacrity than did I from the 
steam-packet's scrubby velvet sofa. Early bird as I 
was, there had been even lighter sleepers; and the 
ship, above and below, was full of joyous life. Dur- 
ing the few hours of darkness, too, that process of 
Transformation I lately spoke of had been making 
rapid progress. I had fallen to sleep, it is true, in 
Spanish waters, but in Anglo-Saxon company, but I 
woke up on board a caravel belonging to the 
Spanish Armada. The grave, sonorous, and dignified 
Castilian — noblest and most Komanesque of tongues 
— resounded on every side; and although the day 
wanted several hours of breakfast -time, the blue 
filmy fumes of the cigar itos were floating about the 
cabin like aromatic gossamer. The consumption of 
chocolate was immense. Only yesterday we had 
been content with an early morning cup of coffee ; but 
chocolate is the sole recognised Spanish desayuno, 
or ' break-fast,' nor, with a glass of cold water and a 
cigarito afterwards, does it make you so very bilious. 



54 UNDER THE SUN 



Or is it that your liver becomes, on your entrance 
into these torrid climes, so utterly disorganised, that 
nothing can make you more bilious, save the yellow 
fever, which kills you? 'If in doubt, take a drink,' 
says the American proverb. You had better give 
chocolate the benefit of the doubt, and drink that; for 
although made so thick that a spoon will well-nigh 
stand upright in the cup, it is a most delicious and 
refreshing beverage. I noticed, too, that several of 
our transatlantic fellow-passengers, in compliment to 
the climate and the Spanish flag, had substituted 
chocolate for their habitual 4 morning glory,' or cock- 
tail; in fact, one gentleman, used to these latitudes, 
informed me that he had i swore off" alcohol alto- 
gether, until when returning from New Orleans, 
whither he was bound, he should be north of Cape 
Florida again ; ' and then,' he concluded, c I guess I 
will change my breath, and nominate my p'ison,' — a 
prudent resolve, and one that Englishmen as well as 
Americans would do well to imitate in the tropics. 
Yellow Jack is a bitter foe, and swamp fever a fear- 
some scourge ; but I will back Old Rye and brandy- 
pawnee to sweep off more Anglo-Saxons in a week, 
than the vomito or the fever will do in a month. 

Tables and chairs covered with oranges — come 
from none could tell precisely where ; but it seems to 
rain oranges in Havana — and the presence of sundry 
officials in suits of white linen or faint blue stripe, 
with huge Panama, hats, helped to complete the idea 
of Transformation. Are you aware of the beauties of 



THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA. 55 

a Panama hat ? It is of fine straw — straw so fine and 
so exquisitely plaited, that it appears to be of one 
united glossy nature. It is as soft as silk, and as 
strong as chain-mail, and as elastic as caoutchouc. 
If you are caught in a shower of rain, and your Pan- 
ama gets wet through, you have only to wring it out 
as though it were a towel, and hang it on your walk- 
ing-stick to dry, and in a quarter of an hour it will 
have regained its pristine shape. The Spaniards de- 
clare that a Panama is shot-proof, and an infallible 
protection against sunstroke; but of these assertions 
I have my doubts. The life of a Panama hat may be 
measured by that of a raven. It is supposed never 
to wear out. At all events, there is a cunning hatter 
in New York, who, for ten dollars, will undertake to 
return to you, as good as new, a Panama which is 
twenty years old, and has been in the wars, and ship- 
wrecked, and thrown into a lime- kiln, a tan-pit, and a 
bucket of tar. This peerless hat is not to be pur- 
chased at a mean price. It is the dearest head-gear 
manufactured. Ked-skinned maidens have intoned 
whole cantos of Indian epics while they plaited and 
sewed together those minute circles of straw. A good 
Panama will stand you in from fifty to seventy-five 
pesos de oro — from ten to fifteen pounds sterling. 

And now, on this first of tropical mornings, did 
the steamer's state-rooms give up their semi- dead. 
Whole families of Seiloras and Sefioritas made their 
appearance in shiny black and pink silks, and low 
mantillas, and pink stockings, and white satin shoes, 



56 UNDER THE SUN 

and colossal fans, ready for any amount of flirtation, 
serenade-hearing, and bull-fight witnessing. Where 
had those Seiloras and Senoritas been for the last five 
days ? On their backs, I trow, in their berths, screech- 
ing piteously when the steamer pitched ; moaning dis- 
mally when she rolled; imbibing chlorodyne, cognac, 
tea, and other nostrums against sea-sickness, and call- 
ing upon many Saints. Our Lady de los Remedios 
might be the best to invoke under such circum- 
stances, perchance. 

There is an immensely stout old lady in violet- 
coloured satin, with a back-comb as high as the horn 
of Queen Philippa in old illuminations, a burnt-sienna 
countenance, a cavalry recruit's moustache, a bright 
green umbrella, and an oaken casket clasped with 
brass under one arm. This is the old lady, I appre- 
hend, to whom the stewardess used to take in such 
tremendous rations of stewed beefsteak, fried bananas, 
and bottled ale every day at dinner-time. She suf- 
fered awfully. Her cries for ' Cerveza Inglesa ' were 
incessant. She was troubled in her mind one after- 
noon, when we had a chopping sea on, and sent for 
one of the Sisters of Charity; but I am sorry to say 
that nurse and patient did not agree, and that the 
good sister was speedily dismissed with unhandsome 
epithets. Sister Egyptiaca being of Irish extraction, 
fresh from an orphanage in New York,— whence she 
was going, good little creature, in perfect peace and 
contentment, to risk her life in the fever-haunted wards 
of a New Orleans hospital — and speaking nothing but 



THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA. 57 

English, and the old lady only talking Spanish, may 
have had something to do with their misunderstand- 
ing. However, the old lady is all right now. She is 
very voluble; she has given the steward a golden 
ducat; and he has kindled a match for her, and she 
has begun to smoke a cigarette. It is reported that 
the oaken casket with the brass "clasps is full of dia- 
monds. The stewardess says, she always kept it under 
her pillow during the voyage. She looks a rich old 
lady; comfortably quilted with ounces, moidores, and 
pieces of eight. I connect her in my mind with a 
huge sugar estate and teeming gangs of negroes. I 
would rather be her Overseer than her Slave, I think. 
It is worthy of remark, as another element in the 
Transformation we have undergone, that our talk is 
now all of a metallic coinage. Five days ago, nobody 
had anything but greenbacks. The stewards won't 
look at greenbacks now. Five days ago, the pas- 
senger who had hoarded a silver dollar was quite a 
lion; he who had an English sovereign hanging to 
his watch-chain was made much of; and one thin, 
dry New Englander, who was absolutely the owner 
of an American gold double eagle — the handsomest 
coin in the world — kept it in a wash-leather case, like 
a watch ; would only exhibit it on pressing solicita- 
tion ; and, I am led to infer, made rather a good thing 
of it by taking the precious piece forward, and allow- 
ing the ' hands ' to smell it at five cents a sniff. But 
what cared we for paper money now ? Piles of gold 
suddenly made their appearance. Little bills for 



58 UNDER THE SUN 

stimulants were paid in five-dollar pieces bearing the 
effigy of Isabel Seguncla. For the first time in my 
life I saw those numismatic parallels to Brobdingnag 
and Lilliput — to dignity and impudence — the gold 
dollar, which is about the size of an English silver 
penny, and the gold doubloon, or ounce, which, to the 
dazed and delighted eye of the possessor, looks as 
large as one of King Croesus's chariot wheels, but is 
in reality about the diameter of a crown-piece, and is 
worth three pounds ten shillings sterling. They say 
Havana is the dearest city in the world ; and I cannot 
help thinking that the costliness of living there is 
mostly due to the fact of the ounce being held to 
many intents and purposes the financial unit. It is 
the Creole sovereign. If you stay at a friend's 
country-house and his body- servant has valeted you, 
you give the man an ounce; if you bet on a cock- 
fight, you bet an ounce ; if a bull-fighter has won your 
approbation, you send him -an ounce ; if the prima 
donna at the Tacon takes a benefit, you purchase a 
stall and pay an ounce — or as many ounces as your 
admiration for the prima donna prompts you to dis- 
burse: A whole lottery-ticket — an entiero, as it is 
called — costs an ounce. If you hire a volante and 
two horses for the day, the driver very coolly de- 
mands an ounce for his fare : in short, I should im- 
agine that the only wild animal in Cuba must be the 
Ounce. ' I call that man a gentleman,' I once heard 
a German settler in Havana remark, ' who can afford 
to lose at monte or tressilio, every day of his life, four 



THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA. 59 

or five ounces.' Four or five ounces! Ingots and 
goldbeaters' hammers! to what a Tom Tiddler's 
ground had I come ! 

I went on deck, where everything was noise r 
bustle, and Transformation, and where they seemed 
already to be taking in oranges, bananas, and cocoa- 
nuts, as a return cargo. The skipper only remained 
untransformed. He wore the same fluffy white hat, 
the same long-skirted bottle-green coat with the same 
blue-black velvet collar, and the same shepherd's-plaid 
trousers in which he had stood imposingly on the 
paddle-bridge of his ship, foot of pier Number Some- 
thing, New York city, five days since. He had a 
heart of oak, this skipper of ours, and I believe was 
an excellent seaman and navigator; but I could never 
divest myself of the impression that he had been con- 
cerned in dry goods, or even a wooden nutmeg fac- 
tory, before he had taken to going down to the sea in 
ships. He had made, I daresay, fifty trips to Cuba, 
but he couldn't speak Spanish yet. He pressed the 
doctor into his service, to act as interpreter in a slight 
dispute with the health officer. ' Ain't posted up in 
his lingo,' he unaffectedly remarked. 

I looked over the side, and drank in a spectacle 
the most gloriously picturesque I had ever beheld. 
I have travelled a good deal; but there are many 
spots, even on the map of Europe, which to me are 
still terra incognita. I have never been to India. I 
have never been in Australia. Looking out upon 
the crowded port of Havana, I was reminded irresis- 



60 UNDER THE SUN. 

tibly of the market-scene in Masaniello — the Morro 
Castle doing duty for Vesuvius. We were close 
upon a quay swarmed with sunburnt varlets in red 
nightcaps, in striped nightcaps, in broad flapping 
straw hats, and some with silken kerchiefs of gay 
colours twisted round their heads. Nearly all wore 
gaudy sashes round their loins. They were bare- 
armed and bare-legged : their shirts were open at the 
breast, and, if they had jackets, those garments hung 
loose upon their shoulders, or with the sleeves tied in 
a knot before them. Dark elf locks, black glittering 
eyes, earrings, and little dangling crosses round the 
neck ; baskets of fish and baskets of fruit, crates of 
crockery, coops of poultry; cries of gratulation, wel- 
come, derision, defiance, quarrels never ending in 
blows, general hubbub and confusion; and over all 
the hot, hot Sun and the cloudless vault of blue. 

But the market-scene in Masaniello soon faded 
away to nothingness. Havana began to assert its own 
individuality. I saw a town whose houses were 
painted in all the colours of the rainbow. I saw long 
lines of gray and crumbling bastions, and curtains 
and ravelins built in old time by jealous Spanish vice- 
roys, and which, I learned, not without pleasure, 
General Dulce, the then Captain-General, was begin- 
ning to demolish, to give the pent-up city of Havana 
elbow-room. From all these bastions and ravelins 
the morning drums and trumpets of the garrison 
were braying and rub-a-dubbing at the most alarming 
rate. The port seemed as full of shipping as the 



THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA. 61 

Pool of London ; and what scant show of blue water 
there was to spare was packed close as Cowes harbour 
at a regatta with the shore-boats. Pretty little skiffs 
they are, with a lateen sail, often decorated with a 
full-length portrait of San Cristobal, the patron saint of 
Havana, and with a gaily striped awning, aft. From 
where we lay was a good twenty minutes' row or sail 
to the custom-house. Were the Americans to gain 
possession of Cuba — a consummation which, for many 
reasons, is most devoutly to be wished, for they 
would be bound to commence their occupation by the 
abolition of slavery — they would have twenty piers 
built in the inner port in less than six months, and 
the passenger steamers would come quietly up to the 
pier-foot and discharge their passengers on the 
wharves without any boats at all; but this is not the 
Spanish way of doing business. 'Mariana,' they 
would answer, were this necessary reform pressed on 
their attention. The authorities are of opinion that 
the harbour boatmen have a right to live as well as 
other folks ; so you are not allowed to proceed from 
your ship to the shore without the intermediary of a 
boatman, to whom you pay a dollar, and as much 
more as he can argue you out of. He never threatens, 
never is rude : his endeavours to obtain an additional 
four and twopence cannot even be called begging. He 
puts the case to you as one between man and man ; 
he appeals to your sense of justice, your self-respect, 
your honour. You are a caballero ; he is a caballero. 
This — here he rests on his oars a moment, or objur- 



62 UNDER THE SUN 



gates Pepe, his assistant, who is putting on too much 
sail — will at once lead you to accede to his demand. 
The name of the boat which conveyed me to the 
shore on this said morning was 4 La Rectitud.' The 
boatman was a most unconscionable rogue ; but there 
was something in the calm assumption of dignity in 
the name on the stern, which drew the dollars from 
us as though we had been two-years children. I am 
reminded that when I use the first person singular, I 
might with greater propriety use the plural ; for in 
this trip to Havana I made one in a party of three. 
I had two genial travelling-companions, both fellow- 
countrymen, in whose mirthful fellowship I enjoyed 
to the full all the humours of Havana, and with one 
of whom I was destined to travel to a stranger and 
more distant land, of which, in process of time, I pur- 
pose to discourse. But, as these travelling com- 
panions happen to be alive and merry — as they will 
probably read these papers, and as one in the Old 
and the other in the New World are as well known as 
Charing Cross* — I feel that it would be impertinent 
to dra^ them into a rambling and fantastic narration, 

O O 7 

full of perverse conceits and most egregious fancies ; 
and I hesitate, too, to veil them under thin pseudo- 

* I may partially lift the veil as regards tliem, now. One of my tra- 
velling companions (alas), Don Eustaquio Barron, whom to know was to love, 
and whose princely hospitality I enjoyed during my stay in Mexico, is dead. 
Of mingled British and Spanish lineage — he used laughingly to say that he 
scarcely knew whether it was in English or in Spanish that he thought — his 
friends declared that he had Two Hearts, and that both were of gold. He was 
continually travelling about, doing kind and generous and noble things ; and 
gentle and simple, rich and poor, alike bewailed his untimely death. 



THE HUMOURS OF HA VAN A. 63 

nyms or provoking dashes. Let me, then, the old 
Babbler, be solely responsible for all I put my egotism 
to : and as for any other travellers, not my immedi- 
ate companions, whom I may touch upon, do you set 
them down as mere brain-worms, abstractions, and 
creatures of the imagination. Do you know that I was 
once most savagely handled by the Affectionate Review 
for having made an 'unmanly attack' on the character 
of a lady, in depicting the airiest shadow in the world 
of a harmless spinster, by name Miss Wapps, with 
whom I journeyed due north, as far as Cronstadt, six- 
teen years ago ? To please critics of the affectionate 
school, all travellers should be blind, and deaf, and 
dumb, and should write their words in invisible ink, 
and publish them in coal-cellars. 

I, then, Babbler, having, after many shouts, and 
with much loss of inward animal moisture, selected 
a boat from among upwards of fifty applicants, saw 
my luggage thereinto, and free pratique having been 
granted by the officer of health, was rowed to shore. 
I should not have minded that health-officer's boat 
as a conveyance, but for the thought that people 
whose business is mainly with the quarantine and the 
lazaretto usually carry about with them the seeds 
of the cholera or the yellow fever, and die thereof. 
It was a most luxurious shallop, with an awning 
striped crimson and white, a rich carpet, and cushioned 
benches. The crimson and gold banner of Spain, 
with the crown on, floated at the stern; and under 
the awning the health officer lolled at his ease, clad 



64 UNDER THE SUN 

in bright nankeen, a red cockade in his Panama, and 
smoking a very big paro. My passport, a docu- 
ment with a very big red seal, granted me by Mr. 
Archibald, her Majesty's Consul at New York, had 
been left with the purser on board the steamer, and 
would duly be transferred to the Havana police 
authorities. The journey to the shore is very pictu- 
resque, though somewhat tedious. One man rows; 
another attends to the sail; both are smoking and 
occasionally squabble; and you, the passenger, are 
expected to steer. If you happen to be totally 
unacquainted with that art and mystery, the possi- 
bility of your running foul of other craft in the port 
is not a very remote one; and sometimes, while the 
boatmen are quarrelling or singing a little duet about 
4 Juani-i-i-ta, la chi-i-i-quita !' the boat lets you know 
that she has something to say for herself, by heeling 
over and capsizing. But I believe no passenger in a 
shore-boat was ever known to be drowned before he 
had paid his fare ; and if you steer badly, the helms- 
man in the next boat may be steering worse; and 
the two negatives make an affirmative, saying 'yes' 
to the question whether you are to get safe to the 
custom-house. I suppose there are persons who can 
steer by intuition. I know there are people who can 
drive mail phaetons, mix salad, and compose cha- 
rades, without ever having been taught. It is a gift. 
One is born to it, as to roasting meat and playing 
the overture to Semiramide on the chin. 

The custom-house was an apartment as big as 



THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA. 65 

a barn — all the rooms in Havana are huge. The 
floor was intolerably dirty ; but the roof was a mag- 
nificent open timber one : the timber being in 
solid beams of delightfully fragrant cedar. So you 
had the Augean Stables underneath, and Solomon's 
Palace in all its glory above — not an uncommon con- 
trast in Cuba. The custom-house officers gave us 
very little trouble. I addressed the first gentleman 
with a cockade I met as c Seilor ' — I should perhaps 
have called him 4 Caballero ' — begged a cigar light 
from him, and slipped a dollar into his hand. He 
opened one of my trunks, let a little tobacco-smoke 
into the orifice to fumigate it, and then dismissed me 
with a very low bow. Then I was handed to a little 
grated wicket, where another official, who was smok- 
ing so desperately that he sat, as it were, in the 
midst of a fleecy cloud, like one of Sir James Thorn- 
hill's allegories in the Painted Hall at Greenwich, 
asked me my name and country, and delivered to 
me a printed license to reside in Cuba for the space 
of three calendar months : which was very kind on 
his part, seeing that I only intended to remain in the 
island until the West India mail-packet came in from 
St. Thomas. This license cost a good deal of money, 
four or five dollars, I think ; and I noticed that when 
the official had filled up the form, he was a very 
long time in sanding it from a small pepper-caster, 
and looked very hard at me. I know, from long ex- 
perience, what being intently regarded by an official 
of the Latin race means, and so c executed' myself 



66 UNDER THE SUN 



without delay. We parted the best of friends, and I 
was a dollar the poorer. 

I was now free to proceed to an hotel; but this 
was much more easily said than done. In. the first 
place, there were no public conveyances about, save 
the volantes, which are vehicles far too ethereal to 
carry heavy luggage ; in the next, to find any toler- 
ably comfortable hotel in Havana is a labour which, 
had it been imposed on Hercules, might have caused 
that strong man to be a little less conceited about his 
triumph over the Erymanthian boar and the eleven 
other difficulties. The wealthy and splendid city of 
Havana is worse off for hotels than any other in the 
civilised world. The Antilles, perhaps, cannot be 
held as belonging entirely to civilisation ; but, as the 
' Queen' of the Antilles, I think Havana might main- 
tain at least one decent inn. There is an hotel in 
the Plaza Isabel Segunda, close to the Tacon The- 
atre, kept by M. Legrand, a Frenchman ; but I had 
heard dismal reports as to its cleanliness, and it 
was situated, besides, beyond the walls, whereas I 
wanted to be near the Plaza de Armas and the sea, 
There is a very excellent boarding-house, clean, com- 
fortable, and well appointed, kept by Mrs. Alme, an 
American lady; but her accommodation is limited, 
and her establishment is nearly always as ' complete* 
as a Parisian omnibus on a wet day. I have been 
told, also, that there is a slight drawback to the 
comfort you enjoy at Mrs. Alme's, in the fact of the 
house being the chosen resort of consumptive invalids 



THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA. 67 

from the United States, who have fled from the as- 
perity of the northern winter to the warmer sky of 
Cuba. But they are often in the penultimate stage 
of the disease when they land; they don't get better; 
and it is apt to spoil your dinner — so I was told — 
when, inquiring for your next neighbour of the day 
before, who talked so charmingly of the last opera, 
and so hopefully of the coming bull-fight, you are 
informed that he has been dead for some hours, and 
will be buried this sundown in the Potters' Field. 
You grow accustomed to this at last ; for it may be 
said, without exaggeration, life in these regions of 
vomito and fever resembles life on board a man-o'- 
war in war-time. You are very merry with Jack and 
Tom overnight ; and on the morrow Jack is ' knocked 
over/ and Tom 'loses the number of his mess,' and 
you say 'Poor Jack!' 'Poor Tom!' Their clothes are 
sold by auction before the mast, and you forget all 
about the sad occurrence. 

With the exception of Legrand's and Mrs. Alme's, 
the inns of Havana are all very like what I should 
imagine the fondas and posadas of Old Spain, away 
from Madrid, to be. I had heard such dreadful 
stories about them, that, blinking the pulmonary 
drawback, I determined to try Mrs. Alme's. By 
this time, with the assistance of several willing and 
grinning negroes, who danced with delight at the 
gift of a very small silver coin — I never saw any 
copper money in Havana — my luggage had been 
piled on a machine closely resembling one of those 



68 UNDER THE SUN 



miniature drays in England, on which a very small 
barrel of beer is drawn by a very big horse, con- 
ducted by a very big man. The beast of draught 
was in this case a bullock, with a tremendous yoke, 
not over his shoulders, but right across his forehead. 
The poor animal certainly earned his bread by the 
sweat of his brow; and, to judge from his lean flanks 
and protruding bones, I should infer that the jerked 
beef he might furnish, subsequent to his demise, 
would be dear at threepence a pound. The con- 
ductor, who sat the horse side-saddle fashion, was a 
wrinkled old negro whose wool had turned white, 
and whose wicked old head — he was such a nasty- 
looking old man — was surmounted by a ragged straw 
hat. He was singing, of course, occasionally varying 
that recreation by skinning and gobbling the pulp of 
some oranges, of which he had a pocketful, and, on 
the whole, took things very easily. I presume he 
was a slave. I was bound to walk behind this sable 
drayman, for, although I might have taken a volante, 
was it not my duty to follow my luggage? And, 
but for an uncomfortable fancy that if I stepped on 
the dray and sat aside my trunk I should look like a 
traitor being drawn to execution at Tyburn on a 
sledge, I would have patronised that mode of locomo- 
tion. 

There was no obtaining admission at Mrs. Alme's. 
Intending visitors had written for their rooms a 
month or six weeks in advance; and the mansion 
was as full of phthisis as a Ventnor lodging-house. 



THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA. 69 

Next I tried the ' Fonda de America/ a few streets 
off. There was some room in that hotel, which was 
under the arcades of a crumbling old portal, not 
unlike the Covent-garden Piazzas, with the aroma of 
all the Spanish onions, leeks, and shallots of the ad- 
joining market hanging about the staircase: — a des- 
potism of garlic tempered by tobacco-smoke. The 
landlady was a German — fair, fat, and twenty-five, 
and was basking in a rocking-chair, enjoying the 
smoke and the smell of onions with apparently in- 
tense gusto. The perfume was almost like Father- 
land. She had one huge apartment to let. It was 
not vacated yet; but the occupant, a French com- 
mercial traveller, who had seemingly just risen, and 
who was carefully oiling and curling himself before a 
glass, most courteously permitted me to inspect the 
room. He was quite affable, indeed, and was good 
enough to inform me that a packet I saw lying on 
a side-table contained some of the genuine Amaran- 
thine soap of her Majesty Queen Yictoria, patented 
and gold medalled at the Universal Exhibition of 
1855, and that he was just then clearing through the 
custom-house eighteen cases of Bully's Toilet Vine- 
gar. Ere I quitted his quarters, he likewise enounced 
the opinion that the island of Cuba was un fichu 
pays, and that the landlady of the Fonda de America 
was a Megere. Heaven bless the Frenchman, wher- 
ever in the world's weary journey you find him! 
He is always easy, sprightly, confidential, and con- 
versational. Bless him for his grimaces, his airy 



70 UNDER THE SUN. 

philosophy, his harmless, naive vanity. He is, with 
the exception of the Englishman, the best travelling 
comrade in the world; only, for an Englishman to 
speak to a stranger to whom he has not been intro- 
duced, the stranger must be in the cramp-stage of 
the cholera morbus, or on the point of having his 
brains blown out by robbers. Then, but then only, 
the Briton becomes own brother to the man he 
doesn't know. But the Frenchman waits for no 
such crisis. 

There was room at the ' America,' but not for all 
of me. You will bear in mind that I was in tripli- 
cate; and so raw was I then to Hispano- American 
usages, that I imagined that a traveller with money 
in his pocket had a right to a bedroom to himself. 
I had yet to learn that our English word comrade is 
derived from three Spanish words — 'camar a dos,' 
double-bedded lodgings. I took a bath at the 
America, for the good of the house and my own (the 
oftener you bathe before eating, and the more seldom 
afterwards, in the tropics, the better it will be for 
you) ; and then the dray, and I and the negro, who 
was a spiteful old man, and had lost his temper fear- 
fully by this time, resumed our peregrinations. We 
tried, I think, at ' Los Dos Amigos,' ' La Reyna de 
Inglaterra,' ' La Corona de Espafia,' and other hostel- 
ries; but the answer in all of them was 'no room, 7 
or 'not room enough.' I was, for the nonce, El 
Seilor 'Ferguson,' and not fated to lodge anywhere; 
and the negro sitting side-saddle on the bullock 



THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA. 71 

began to spit and swear in Spanish, like an infu- 
riated old cat. 

But to me the time was not all lost. Far from 
it. I had begun to study the humours of Havana. 
The time had worn away, it was ten o'clock, and the 
city had burst into the full blaze of tropical life. 
The Anglo-Americans rail at Havana, because the 
streets are so narrow and so tortuous ; but ah ! from 
ten to four p.m., how grateful you are for narrow 
devious lanes, in lieu of broad staring thoroughfares! 
You have the inestimable blessing of Shade. Now 
and then you must take, perforce, a hot bath, and 
frizzle for a moment in the sunshine as you cross a 
plaza; or, turning a corner, the sun, suddenly espy- 
ing you, cleverly shoots a ray at your head, which 
pierces your brain well-nigh as an arrow would : but 
you are soon in the shade again. The streets of 
Havana are perhaps as clean as those of most southern 
European towns. The principal sanitary inspectors 
are named Garlic and Tobacco-smoke. They are at 
least determined to keep the other stenches down. 
The roadway is littered and untidy, but who should 
complain of litter composed mainly of orange-peel, 
the rinds of pine-apples, cocoanut shells, fragments 
of melons, and exhausted Indian corn-cobs ? I must 
go to Covent-garden again for a comparison. Don't 
you know that delightful litter between the grand 
avenue and the Old Hummums — -I mean that spot 
where the orange-boxes are bursting, and the almonds 
are tumbling out of their sacks, and the Irish market- 



72 UNDER THE SUN 

women sit in the June afternoon shelling peas. The 
scene is untidy, but grand. I always think of the 
Garden of Eden run to seed, in consequence of the 
gardener, Adam, having been turned away for stealing 
apples. 

There is but a ridiculous apology for a foot-pave- 
ment in these streets. The average width of the 
trottoir certainly does not exceed twelve inches. It 
is a kerbstone with nothing to curb. I have fancied 
this exiguity of path to be a deliberate device on the 
part of the municipality to keep up the practice of 
politeness in Havana, for of course, if you meet any 
one on the trottoir proceeding in a contrary direction 
to your own, you naturally step into the kennel to 
allow him to pass. You don't give him the wall, you 
give him the totality of the pavement. This hypo- 
thesis, I fear, however, is as fantastical as the one sug- 
gested, that the narrowness of the streets in Havana 
is also due to premeditation, and is designed to allow 
opposite neighbours to light their cigars from each 
other's weeds. Small as is the space between the 
houses, they preserve, nevertheless, a tolerably per- 
pendicular elevation ; whereas in the town of Algiers, 
which in the narrowness of its thoroughfares closely 
resembles Havana, the houses are built on the lean-to 
principle. Each story seems on the brink of toppling 
over; and at the roofs, opposite houses nearly kiss 
each other. I have heard that the Moorish architects 
adopted this style of construction from notions of 
economy. You see that all but the very narrowest 



THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA. 73 

strip of sky must be shut out. Why ? The heavens 
above are for ten hours out of the twenty -four 
one blazing basin of burnished copper. The Cubans, 
however, being wealthy, can afford to leave a wider 
space between their houses ; but while the sun 
shines they shut him out with vast awnings of 
particoloured stuffs. This aspect of Havana would 
delight the heart of an Edgington. The populous 
part of the city is one huge marquee. 

Ah, and how shady the shops are! There are 
some as dark as the purser's store-room in a cockpit. 
You enter them, not only to shop, but to bestow 
yourself in a rocking-chair, to nod, and to take, if you 
please, forty winks. The shopkeeper never dreams 
of disturbing you. He puts your nap in the bill ; 
that is to say, he adds fifty per cent to the price of 
the articles you wish to purchase. Of course you beat 
him down. Your bargain for everything in Havana 
mayor o menor, wholesale or retail. The apothecary 
who sells you a blue pill expects an amicable little 
tussle over the price. What matter ? It fills up the 
time ; and unless you are concerned in sugar or coffee, 
you are sure to have plenty of time hanging on your 
hands. 'Are there no beggars at your gate? are 
there no poor about your lands ? the Poet Laureate 
might indignantly ask. Well, the poor are slaves, 
and are very fat and shiny, and seemingly well cared 
for (which does not in the least militate against 
slavery being a stupid, blundering, and accursed an- 
achronism, of which the Spaniards themselves are 



74 UNDER THE SUN 



heartily sick), and as for the beggars, I never saw 
any in Havana; and, had I met one, I should cer- 
tainly not have presumed to offer him less than a 
golden dollar. 

The tradespeople seldom, if ever, put their names 
over their shop-fronts. They adopt signs instead — 
not painted or plastic ones as the Americans and the 
Germans do, but simply written inscriptions usually 
implying some ethical allusion. 'La Rectitud,' our 
old friend of the boat, is much patronised by the 
mercers ; but that tradesman in the Calle O'Reilly 
must have had queer ideas of rectitude when he 
charged me seventy-five dollars for a dress professedly 
made of pina or pine-apple fibre, but which subse- 
quently turned out to be a silk grenadine from Lyons, 
not worth three guineas. Then you have ' La Pro- 
bidad,' 'La Integridad,' 'La Buena Fe,' 'La Con- 
sciencia' — all special favourites with the gentlemen 
of the narrow width and ell wand. Their signs are 
very pretty, but methinks they do profess too much. 
Some are simply arrogant, ' Todos mi elogian '■ — I am 
praised by everybody; ' Mi famo per l'Orbo vuela' — 
my fame is universal : these are over the cigar- shops. 
The photographer has a flourish about ' El Sol de 
Madrid ' and ' El Kayo de Luz ;' one studio went by 
the name of ' El Relampago ' — the flash of lightning ; 
and I never could refrain from laughing at the motto 
adopted by the proprietor of a shop for the sale of 
lucifer nfatches — 'La Explosion.' 

And now, if you please, picture these thread-my- 



THE HUMOURS OF HAVANA. 75 

needle thoroughfares, not one of them a third so wide 
as Hanway-yard, shady to intensity, but yet rich in 
the tender tints of reflected light, and semitones steal- 
ing through the diaphanous awnings overhead, with 
here and there a burst, a splash, an ' explosion/ of 
positive light and colour — where the sun has found 
a joint in the armour of awning, and made play with 
his diamond dart ; picture these lanes thronged from 
morning till night with sallow Spanish Creoles, in 
white linen and Panamas, and negroes and negresses 
gaudy, gaping, and grinning, according to the wont of 
our African brothers and sisters. Now and then a 
slouch-hatted, black-cassocked priest, now and then a 
demure Jesuit father ; many soldiers in suits of i seer- 
sucker,' a material resembling thin bed-ticking, straw 
hats, and red cockades ; many itinerant vendors of 
oranges, lemonade, sugar-plums, and cigars, for though 
every third shop is a tobacconist's, there is a lively 
trade in cigars done in the streets. The narrowness 
of the foot-pavement affects you little. You may walk 
in the roadway without inconvenience. There is no- 
thing to run over you save the bullock-drays, whose 
rate of speed rarely exceeds a mile an hour, and the 
pack-mules, which are so laden with fresh-cut Indian 
corn-stalks for fodder that only their noses and the 
tips of their tails are visible beneath their burdens, 
and they look like animated hayricks — and the vo- 
lantes, which are so light and springy that they would 
scarcely crush the legs of a fly if their wheels passed 
over him. 



76 UNDER THE SUN 



I confess that these several and sundry humours 
of Havana were, when first I viewed them, subordi- 
nated to my intense desire to find an inn in which I 
could take mine ease ; and I was on the point of de- 
siring the old negro (who was frantic with rage by 
this time) to turn his bullock's head to the city gates 
and journey towards Legrand's, when the odour of a 
decidedly first-rate cuisine attracted me, and ulti- 
mately induced me to put up at an inn in the Calle 
del Obispo. To tell the truth, I wanted my breakfast, 
desperately. 



HAVANA CIGARS. 

She wakes. She is all alive. I have got my 
Muse fast at Florian's, on St. Mark's Place, Venice, 
and on a sumptuous summer night. The great full 
moon hangs over our heads, imminent, like the sign 
of the World Turned Upside Down. I have regaled 
my Muse with iced coffee and macaroons. She has 
even partaken of a bicchierino of maraschino. A 
' bicchierino' — isn't it a dainty name for a dram ? 
Then, rubbing my hands in uncharitable glee, to 
think that yonder white -jerkined Tedesco officers 
have nothing choicer to smoke than three-halfpenny 
' Virginias' — the actual Virginia of their birth being, 
probably, the Terra di Lavoro, or the Island of Sar- 
dinia — I produce from that private case, which has 
hitherto eluded the lynx eyes of the German Zoll- 
verein, the Spanish Duana, and the Italian Dogana, a 
real cigar — a Regalia Britannica, ' Plor fina, Maduro : 
Havana, 1864.' My Muse lights up at once, and 
pours forth memory in clouds. You need not be 
in the least shocked at the idea of this young lady 
from Parnassus, otherwise a most decorous person, 
graduate of the Hyde-Park College, and who has 
been nursery-governess in a nobleman's family, in- 



78 UNDER THE SUN 

dulging in a cigar as big as a B.B. pencil, at ten 
o'clock at night, in front of a public coffee-house. 
Between ourselves be it mentioned, there are many- 
ladies in Venice who are, to the full, as inveterate 
smokers as the ladies of Seville. My Muse, perhaps, 
is the only high-born dame who puffs in the open 
Piazza; but then, she is invisible to the vulgar, and 
an Immortal. You shall scarcely, however, take an 
evening airing in your gondola without observing 
numerous fair and graceful forms at their open win- 
dows, or in their balconies, enjoying, not the pretty 
puerility of the papelito, but the downright and 
athletic exer citation of the full-grown cigar. About 
sundown, on most evenings, our gondoliers row us 
from the Ponte de' Fuseri to the Giardini Pubblici. 
We strike the Grand Canal a little below the garden 
of the Palazzo Reale. At the left-hand corner of the 
canal from which we emerge there is a pretty little 
mansion, Venetian Gothic in style, and", for Venice, 
in excellent repair. It is precisely the little mansion 
which, if its bodily eradication, shipment to Liver- 
pool, and removal to London, on the American sys- 
tem of rollers, was judged impossible, I should like 
to cause Mr. Barry, R.A., to build for me in Curzon- 
street, Mayfair; and then, with the title-deeds of the 
freehold in my strong-box, and the bins of my bijou 
house well ballasted with curious hocks and peculiar 
clarets, I would lead a chirping life, entertaining my 
friends, drinking even mine enemy's health, and 
wishing him better luck the next time he went out 



HAVANA CIGARS. 79 



stabbing. At a charming oriel window of this tiny 
palazzetto there is sure to be, about this sunset hour, 
a plump, jovial-looking little lady — very like the 
portraits of the Countess Guiccioli — and who is pull- 
ing at a cigar at least half an inch longer and stouter 
than my Regalia Britannica, I think the plump 
little lady smokes ' ambasciadores ' — a kind of cigar 
which you hesitate about consuming habitually unless 
your income exceeds fifteen thousand a year. In 
about an hour after sunset we glide back from the 
Giardini towards the Rialto, and there, at the same 
oriel window, we are sure to find the same plump 
little lady pulling away as vigorously as ever at her 
weed. It is not, I am afraid, the same cigar. Even 
in an c ambasciador ' there are not more than forty- 
five minutes' steady and continuous smoking. It has 
grown dark by this time, and through the open 
casement I can see a delicious little salon with a 
frescoed ceiling, containing that 'copiosa quantita 
d' amoretti' which Cardinal Maurice, of Savoy, was so 
anxious that Albano, the painter, should supply him 
with. I see a chandelier, glittering with crystal pen- 
dents and wax-lights — the good old candles of yellow 
wax, not the meagre, bleached, half-hearted gentili- 
ties the chandlers sell us too often nowadays. I 
see walls with silken draperies, and choice pictures, 
and rare Venice mirrors, with frames like a whole 
horticultural show carved in gold. The furniture of 
the salon is of precisely the pattern I should wish 
Messrs. Jackson and Graham to send me into Curzon- 



80 UNDER THE SUN 

street : — sparing no expense, and asking no questions 
about settlement. I hope that the eyes which have 
thus dived into the penetralia of a Venetian dwelling- 
house are not impertinent. Where is the use of 
having pretty things, if you don't allow the world 
outside [to admire them ? and are not all the really 
nice people who possess pretty things always ready 
to exhibit their treasures? Finally, at the window 
of this enchanting chamber, amidst flowers in boxes 
and flowers in vases, and with a sprightly little 
Maltese dog snoozing in her sleeve, is the prettiest 
picture of all — the plump little lady, blowing her 
placid cloud : 

' Se non son piii Sovrana, 
Son sempre Veneziana,' 

she seems to be warbling between her whiffs, in that 
endearing dialect of the Adriatic which is as soft as 
creme a la vanille, and a great deal healthier. 

I salute you, noble lady of Venice ! Did I dare 
to launch into familiarity — did I presume to indulge 
in slang, I might say what I think — that you are a 
Brick. In any case, I prefer you to Medora in her 
bower, to Mariana in the South, and to the Lady of 
Shalott. I would bow to you, Lady mine, were not 
bowing under the coved roof of a gondola almost as 
difficult a feat as bowing in bed. More than once 
the little lady has waved a smoke-spiral amicably 
towards me. There is a certain freemasonry among 
smokers. I am thinking that to-morrow evening I 
shall wave my handkerchief to her, when I am vio- 



HAVANA CIGARS. 81 

lently pulled back on to the cushions of the gondola, 
and the boatmen are instructed in a passionate femi- 
nine voice to row faster homewards. There is no 
harm, surely, in wishing to wave one's handkerchief 
to such a remarkably plump and jovial-looking little 
lady. 

Yes, red-sashed boatman, even with my ears 
boxed, take me home ; and then, when I have filled 
my inkhorn and nibbed my pen, take me, if you 
please, back to Havana. Never mind the heat. We 
shall be hotter before we are through this day's work. 
Never mind the dust. The sea-breeze will blow 
some time after gun-fire, and if you can exist un- 
smothered until then, you will be refreshed. Let us 
hail the first volante, whose dark and merry-faced 
postillion invites us to enter, and drive to the cigar 
manufactory, world famous, and unequalled in the 
world, perhaps, of c La Hija de Cabana y Carvajal.' 
For shortness, it is called ' Cabana's.' 

There is no longer a palpable Cabana in the flesh. 
Firms remain, but partners pass away. Is there a 
Child ? Is there a Fortnum, or, haply, a Mason ? Is 
there a Chevet, or a Widow Clicquot ? Did you ever 
see Swan and Edgar walking together ? There has 
not been a Cramer for twenty years ; and what con- 
temporary man ever knew Boodle? The actual 
representative of the great Cuban house of Cabaiia 
is the Seiior Anselmo del Yalle. I had had the 
advantage of a special introduction to this gentleman 

G 



82 UNDER THE SUN 

at his retail establishment ere I visited his factory. 
The monarch of Nicotine sat enthroned among odo- 
riferous cedar boxes and cigars yet more fragrant, 
serene and sweet-smelling, like an old Turk mer- 
chant in the Bezesteen among his shawls, and chi- 
bouks, and spices, and rose-attar. A lissom, dusky, 
oily-looking man, if I remember aright, with a lus- 
trous, bush-like moustache, and who, reclining in a 
low chair, and in a full suit of white linen, was gently 
perspiring. The chief monarch of the great mosque 
of Araby the blest, this Seilor Anselmo del Valle. 
What a halcyon existence ! A mattress of lotus-hair 
— a continuous and diaphanous drapery of grateful 
incense hanging round. Nothing to do all day long- 
save to loll in a rocking-chair, and take gold ounces 
in exchange for boxes of superfine Cabanas. For the 
cigar business is essentially a ready-money one. So 
many cigars as you make you can sell ; and so many 
cigars as you sell do you get paid for, in Havana, on 
the nail. I have often thought that to be a brewer 
of pale ale at Burton-on- Trent must be the acme of 
human felicity. You have only to go on brewing 
barrels of beer, and an ever-thirsty public will go on 
buying and paying. Dr. Johnson had an inkling of 
this, when, taking stock, as executor under Thrale's 
will, of the great brewhouse which was afterwards to 
become Barclay and Perkins's, he told Topham Beau- 
clerk that he had at last discovered the ' source of 
boundless prosperity and inexhaustible riches.' When 



HAVANA CIGARS. 83 



I went to Havana, however, I was fain to place the 
vat in the second rank. The superlative degree I 
reserve for the cigar trade. 'Boundless prosperity 
and inexhaustible riches' are, in the case of a Cabana 
or an Anselnio del Yalle, associated with something 
even more productive of happiness. The cigar mer- 
chant can pass, at least, eighteen hours out of the 
twenty-four in the delicious occupation of smoking 
his own cigars. JSTow the Burton brewer, however 
fond he may be of the famous decoction of hops, 
malt, and the water of the Mendip Hills, fermented 
on the placid banks of Trent, can scarcely go on 
drinking his own pale ale all day long. Nature 
wouldn't stand it. The brain and stomach would 
alike revolt from this perpetual state of beer. As a 
rule, traders are averse from consuming their own 
wares. Some, sagacity warns off : others, satiety 
sickens. Your provincial innkeeper does not share 
with a very good grace, and with a chance guest, 
the bottle of red ink, logwood, and spirits of tur- 
pentine which he sells as claret, and charges ten and 
sixpence for. The grocer's apprentice soon grows 
tired of filching figs and munching raisins — ah! how 
nice they were when, as children, we were allowed 
to stone the plums for the Christmas pudding, and 
stole more than we stoned ! — on the sly. The pastry- 
cook's girl runs to the counter, indulges in a revel 
of patties and jam tarts ; but in a fortnight she be- 
comes palled, and a wilderness of sweets rarely invites 



84 UNDER THE SUN. 



her to browse. It is different with the merchant 
who sells good cigars. He knows when he is well 
off, and makes the most of his opportunity. i Carpe 
diem' is his motto, as it was that of the Regent 
Orleans. Heart- complaint, paralysis, liver-complaint, 
dyspepsia, cerebral disease in its thousand-and-one 
forms, may menace those who smoke too much ; but 
the merchant knows when he has a good article on 
hand, and continues to smoke the choicest weeds in 
his stock. A cigar merchant who did not smoke 
seems to me quite as much of a monster as that 
French bibliomaniac of the eighteenth century, whom 
La Bruyere knew, who had a library of eighty thou- 
sand volumes, splendidly bound, and who confessed 
that he never read a book. 'I think/ says La Bruyere, 
in his mention of this person, c that he only amassed 
volumes because he liked the smell of new leather. 
But why, then, didn't he turn tanner instead of book- 
worm?' 

I have a distinct impression that after Seilor An- 
selmo del Valle had squeezed my hand — he squeezed 
everybody's hand — on my being presented to him, he 
left in my palm a Cabana regalia. They give away 
cigars in Cuba as they give away pinches of snuff 
elsewhere. I w r ent into the back warehouse to choose 
a case of prensados for ordinary smoking, and the 
warehouseman gave me a handful just to try what 
their flavour might be like. These are among the 
'obsequios.' When I got home to mine inn that 



HAVANA CIGARS. 85 



evening, I found even a more splendid 4 obsequio' from 
the Cabana factory, in the shape of a beautiful crystal 
casket framed in gilt bronze, inscribed with my name 
— ' Caballero Ingles' being added as a dignity — and 
containing one hundred of the superlative cigars 
known as ' excepcionales.' These are said to be worth 
in England half-a-crown apiece, and are, indeed, only 
manufactured in order to be dispensed to crowned 
heads or presented as l obsequios' to tourists. I am 
ashamed to say that — sentiments of gratitude apart — 
I would grudge sixpence for the best excepcionale 
that ever was made. Their mere fabrication is beyond 
compare. They are perfect convoluted cylinders of to- 
bacco-leaf, mathematically symmetrical, showing not a 
join, a vein, or a pimple — with the broad end as round 
and smooth as that of a Cumberland pencil; with 
the narrow end as sharply blunt — a paradox, but a 
truth for all that — as the agate burnisher used for em- 
bossing diapers in illumination. I think that were you 
to throw an excepcionale into the midst of Westmin- 
ster Hall, it would not break, nor lie, but the rather 
rebound, elastic, and come back to you at last, intact, 
but bent, boomerang fashion. Its defect is that it is 
a world too light — that is to say, too mild in flavour 
— and that, like all mild cigars, it is hot in the mouth. 
To the thorough smoker there is no more feverish 
tobacco than the lightest Latakia, and no cooler than 
the strongest Cavendish. Mild-tobacco smoking leads 
to drinking: witness the Turk, with his continually 



S6 UNDER THE SUN 



replenished coffee- cup, and the German, who washes 
down the chopped-up haystacks which he crams into 
his pipkin of a pipe with innumerable mugs of beer. 
Not always innumerable. They count them some- 
times. The Prussian guardsmen who were regaled 
at the Peace rejoicings at Berlin were limited to 
one bottle of wine and ten seidels of beer apiece. Ten 
seidels — ten mortal pints and a half of swipes in one 
October evening! It must ooze through their 
pores, and make them clammy. 

From the hospitable retail establishment of the 
seilor to his factory, or rather that of the Hija de Ca- 
banas y Carvajal, is a drive of about twenty minutes. 
The Fabrica is a grandiose building of white stone, 
and of the architectural style which may be described 
as West Indian Doric : that is to say, with plenty of 
porticos, and columns, and vestibules, erected much 
more for the purpose of producing coolness than pic- 
torial effect. There are at least a thousand operatives 
employed here ; but the mere number of hands is no 
test of the importance of a cigar manufactory. At 
the huge Eeale Fabrica de Tabacos, in Seville, over 
four thousand men and women, nearly half of them 
gipsies, find employment. The Kegio, at Algiers, 
gives daily work to over fifteen hundred hands. The 
cigar factories of Bordeaux, Barcelona, Ancona, and 
Venice, are on a corresponding scale of magnitude ; 
but please to bear in mind that the staple of the 
things made in the u sines I have named is mere 



HAVANA CIGARS. 87 



muck, rubbish, refuse ; whereas the Hija de Cabailas 
y Carvajal turns out only choice and fragrant rolls of 
superfine tobacco. 

If anything could improve on the dreamy balmi- 
ness which falls on the contemplative mind in these 
vast halls, all devoted to the treatment and prepara- 
tion of tobacco, it would be the fact that the ceiling of 
every room is of cedar. 'Tis in the groves of Mount 
Lebanon, or, if you choose to be more prosaic, in an 
atmosphere of lead-pencils, that your weeds are made. 
1 confess that ere I had been half an hour in the 
Cabana factory I became immersed in a kind of 
happy fog or state of coma, such as ordinarily incited 
Messrs. Coleridge and De Quincey — in the good old 
days when it was thought no harm to crack a decanter 
full of laudanum before dinner — to literary composi- 
tion. This must serve as my excuse for the very 
vague manner in which I am enabled to describe the 
process of making cigars. I know that I saw great 
bales and bundles of tobacco, just brought in from 
the plantations, being weighed in one long hall by 
negro women. The stuff was piled into monstrous 
scales, like those used in their dealings with the 
Indians who had furs to sell by the crafty traders in 
old Manhattan — who laid down the axiom that a 
Dutchman's foot weighed ten pounds, and popped 
their foot into the scale accordingly. I know that I 
subsequently saw tobacco in all stages of being 
cleaned, and picked, and sorted, the finer leaves being 



88 UNDER THE SUN 

reserved for the coverings or sheaths of the cigars, 
the less choice being used to form what magazine 
editors call 'padding,' and the Cubans themselves, 
when speaking of cigars, 'las tripas' — a term not 
quite translatable to genteel ears, but which I may 
render, in a guarded manner, as 'insides.' If you of- 
fer a Spaniard a cigar — not with a view that he should 
smoke, but that he should criticise it — he will, after 
expressing the preliminary wish that you may live a 
thousand years, produce a sharp penknife and slice 
the weed through diagonally. Then, with a strong 
magnify ing-glass, he will scrutinise 'las tripas/ and 
tell you, as confidently as any Loudon or Linna3us 
could, the precise order of vegetation to which the 
cigar belongs — whether it is of the superfine c vuelta 
de abajo,' the Clos Yougeot of Nicotia, or of some in- 
ferior growth, either from the island of Cuba itself, or 
from Hayti, or Porto Eico, or Virginia, or Maryland, 
or the Carolinas, or, haply, from the south and east of 
Europe ; for vast quantities of Hungarian, Austrian, 
Sardinian, and Bessarabian tobacco do find their way 
to Cuba, and come back to us in the guise of prime 
Havanas — that is certain. A minute investigation of 
'las tripas' may also lead to the painful disclosure 
that the cigar is not composed of tobacco at all. The 
periodical reports of her Majesty's commissioners of 
Inland Revenue point out, pretty plainly, what vile 
stuff is sometimes foisted on the public as genuine 
tobacco. 



HAVANA CIGARS. 89 



You run no risk, of course, of having a sophisti- 
cated cigar from the factory of the Hija de Cabana y 
Carvajal. Their wares are of different qualities— just 
as claret is, and the quality perhaps takes as wide a 
range as Bordeaux takes between Medoc and Chateau 
Lafitte. But a Cabana cigar — bought at Cabana's, 
bien entendu, or at any reputable dealer's in London 
(no foreign cigar merchant I ever met with could be 
trusted even so far as I could see him) — is sure to be 
made of genuine tobacco. You are quite safe, also, 
with a cigar from the Partagas factory — and there 
are many amateurs who prefer Partagas to Cabanas ; 
you are equally safe with an Alvarez ; with a Cavar- 
gas; with a Lopez; with a Cealdos (of the Guipuz- 
coana manufactory), and especially with a Figaro. 
Some persons imagine the name of ' Figaro' to be that 
of a brand, or form of cigar, such as a 4 Henry Clay ' 
or a 'Londres;' but it is really that of a factory. 
I may mention our ' Lion' and ' Eomford' breweries 
by way of analogy. I need not say that there are 
scores more respectable traders in Havana who make 
good and unadulterated cigars ; but the names I 
have set down are those best known, and most 
popular with smokers. 

On the broadest principle of classification, the 
cigars which are really brought from the Island of 
Cuba to Europe may be divided into three great 
groups. First, genuine Havanas, of various degrees 
of fineness, but, from stem to stern, sheath and 4 tri- 



90 UNDER THE SUN. 



pas,' made of tobacco grown, cured, and rolled in the 
Island of Cuba. Second, cigars composed inside of 
United States, or of European tobacco, imported into 
the island, but with an outside wrapper of Havana 
leaf. Third and last, cigars brought ready made into 
Havana, from Europe — mostly from Bremen and Swit- 
zerland — passed through some export house unfair 
enough to be an accomplice in such dealings, and re- 
exported to Europe. You rarely meet with these 
doubly sham cigars in England; but they form the 
staple of the article retailed at extravagant prices to 
travellers at continental hotels. They smoke so 
abominably that the consumer usually jumps at the 
conclusion that they are simply ' duffers,' with forged 
brands and labels on the boxes; but, if he imparts 
this assumption to the waiter, that functionary may 
in his turn often assume an air of injured innocence 
and virtuous indignation. He can tell the complain- 
ant the name of the wholesale dealer from whom he 
has purchased the cigars : nay, he is often enabled to 
point out on the box the actual government stamp, 
and the amount of duty paid on the contents as 
foreign cigars. I have gone down with a waiter to a 
custom-house and seen him clear from the ship and 
pay duty upon the cigars he has sold me, and yet 
have found them afterwards to be the merest rubbish. 
It is unjust to make Cuba responsible for the preva- 
lence of such trash. The rubbishing cigars hav r e been 
to Havana, but were not made there. What is it the 



HAVANA CIGARS. 9 r 

Bulbul, in the Persian poem, remarks relative to the 
rose ? I think he observes that he is not that flower, 
but that he has lived near her. So Bremen, which has 
paid a flying visit to Havana, may be regarded as a 
kind of rascally Bulbul. 

This species of fraud is too clumsy and too slow 
for the great English people. We, who are so very 
hard on the Americans for their c smartness,' habit- 
ually resort in trade to perhaps the most ingenious 
swindles, the most impudent deceptions, and the 
meanest and most detestable i dodges,' of any nation 
in the world. We adulterate everything. We forge 
everything. We would adulterate the mother earth 
which is thrown on our coffins when we are buried, if 
that fraud would pay. There is not a petty tobacco- 
nist's shop in a London back street without a stock 
of cigar boxes, whose brands, whose printed labels — 
down to the bluntness of the Spanish type and the 
poverty of the Spanish wood-engravings — are cool 
and literal forgeries of the Spanish originals. These 
brands and labels are forged quite as neatly as 
bank-notes are forged; but this is a 'trick of 
trade' which has not yet become felony. I have 
seen with my own eyes, in a great English town, 
and in a cigar factory employing three hundred 
men, the brands ready for heating and stamping — - 
a kind of chamber of horrors — where there were 
no less than ninety different trade-marks purport- 
ing to be those of leading houses in Havana, and 



92 UNDER THE SUN 



all of which were false. The excuse of the people 
who resort to these wretched artifices is, that they 
vend the wares thus spuriously branded and labelled 
as 'British/ and not as 'foreign' cigars. What's in 
a name ? they ask ; and so they call a cabbage a Ca- 
bana, just for the fun of the thing. But would it be 
fair, 1 may ask, to stamp the little figure of the 
' perro,' or dog, which is the trade-mark of the real 
Toledo blade, on the haft of a carving-knife made at 
Liege, or to brand c Moet et Chandon' on the cork of 
a bottle of cider ? There are, doubtless, numbers of 
highly trustworthy cigar manufacturers in England, 
who make their cigars of the very best foreign tobacco 
that can be imported; but I must refer again to the 
reports of the Commissioners of Inland Revenue for 
some very ugly revelations made from time to time as 
to fines inflicted on manufacturers who adulterate 
their tobacco ; and, in any case, the practice of mark- 
ing the boxes which contain home-made cigars, even 
if they be of good tobacco, with the names and brands 
of celebrated Havana houses, is unfair, untradesman- 
like, and immoral. I daresay, however, that I am but 
fighting with wild beasts at Ephesus in alluding to 
such matters, and that I shall get but scratches for 
my pains. Only, to unwary people who happen to be 
young and wealthy I will say this: whenever you 
have anything to do with cigars, or with sherry, or 
with pictures, or with horses, look out. Some ad- 
visers would include women and diamonds in their 



HAVANA CIGARS. 93 

caveat; but I halt at horses. They may have a flaw 
in them, but a woman is a woman, and a diamond a 
diamond, and you can tell paste at once. 

A visit to Cabana's manufactory, although it failed 
in enabling me to describe with terseness, combined 
with accuracy, the process of cigar-making, had at 
least one beneficial result in disabusing hiy mind of a 
variety of absurd stories which I, and I daresay a 
good many of those who read this paper, had heard 
regarding the process as pursued in the island of 
Cuba. To believe these legends, cigar-making is one 
of the nastiest, nay, the most revolting of handicrafts, 
and the manner in which the tobacco is rolled and 
shaped by imperfectly clad young ladies of the 
African race, and in a state of servitude, is, to say the 
least, shocking. There may be small manufacturers 
at Havana who own but two or three slaves, or em- 
ploy but two or three workwomen, and they may do 
their work in a brutish and uncleanly manner ; but so 
far as my own experience at the Hija de Cabanas y 
Carvajal's renders me a trustworthy witness, I may 
vouch for the scrupulous cleanliness and delicacy with 
which every single stage in the process of cigar-mak- 
ing is conducted. I have seen barley-sugar made, 
and I have seen bread made, and I certainly consider 
the manufacture of cigars to be a nicer transaction 
than either bread or sweetstuff making. 

Nothing can be more orderly, more symmetrical, 
than the appearance of the cutting and shaping room. 



94 ' UNDER THE SUN. 

The operators sit to their work, and make the cigars 
with their fingers, but do not roll them into shape by 
attrition on their sartorial muscles, as is popularly 
supposed. Every operator, has his counter or desk, 
his sharp cutting tools, and his pot of gum for fasten- 
ing the tips, with his stock of assorted tobacco-leaf in 
baskets by his side. It is a competitive vocation. The 
best workmen are best off. Payment is by results. 
Many of the hands employed are negro slaves, or 
were so when I was in Havana ; but the finer cigars, 
the prime Cabaiias, the Napoleones, the Excepci- 
onales and Regalias are made exclusively by white 
Creole Spaniards, who are paid according to the 
number they can turn out a day, and many of whom 
realise very handsome wages. 

Good cigars are very dear in Havana. You may 
get a weed for a penny or threehalfpence ; or some- 
times, by industriously rooting among the small 
manufacturers, you may pick up cigars very cheap 
indeed, which, if you throw them into a drawer, and 
allow them to season for six months, may turn out 
to be tolerable ; but an approved and warranted cigar 
from a first-rate house will always fetch its price, 
and our heavy import duties notwithstanding, is not 
much cheaper in Havana than it is in England. I have 
appended in a foot-note (for fear of boring you)* the 

* Napoleones di lujo, 300 dolls. ; Excepcionales, 255 dolls. ; Regalias, 
flor fina, 130 dolls. ; Imperiales, 130 dolls. ; Embajadores, flor fina, 120 
dolls. ; Esparteros, 100 dolls.; Regalias Chicas, 80 dolls.; Conchas, 80 dolls.; 



HAVANA CIGARS. ' 95 



price-list of Cabaila cigars for the year 1864. Since 
then the tariff has, I daresay, risen. I may add that 
it is generally understood in the cigar trade that the 
very finest and choicest qualities of Havana cigars go 
to England simply because the largest prices can be 
commanded there; yet I believe I am rather under 
than above the mark in stating that there are not 
thirty cigar dealers in London from whom fine and 
choice Havanas can be procured. It has been com- 
puted — although I have no official authority for the 
statement — that of the cigars manufactured by the 
Hija de Cabanas y Carvajal at least forty per cent go 
to England, thirty per cent to the United States — 
California taking the largest quantity — ten per cent 
to Brazil, five to Russia, five to Erance, five to Spain, 
two to Germany, two to Australia, leaving one per 



Cilisedrados, 75 dolls. ; Aromaticos, 75 dolls. ; Comme-il-fauts, 70 dolls. ; 
Cazadores, 65 dolls. ; Pigmeos, 45 dolls. ; Media Regalias, GO dolls. ; Lon- 
clres flor fina, 55 dolls.; do. de calidad, 45 dolls. ; Biioas o Punsaclos, 55 
dolls.; Panalclos Caballeros, 50 dolls.; Trabucos, 55 dolls.; Principes, 
50 dolls. ; Cabana kings (one of the sweetest varieties of cigar extant), 
35 dolls. ; Medianos; 50 dolls. — all per thousand and in gold currency. 
Among miscellaneous cigars, the price of which per thousand may be com- 
puted at about five-and-twenty per cent under Cabanas, I find in my 
note-book, as to sizes, Trabucillos and Bajonetas, and as to brands and 
makes, ' El Principe de Galles,' ' Lincoln,' ' H. Upmann,' ' Los dos Her- 
manos' (the two brothers), ' Salvadores,' ' La Vida,' 'Jose Rodriguez,' 
' Flor Cubaiias las delicias,' ' Consuelos' (out of compliment to Madama 
George Sand, I presume), El aquila Parisiana (Bismarck's particular, it 
is to be imagined), Juan de Chinchuretta, Fleur de Marie, Florde Man- 
rico (an odd combination of souvenirs of the Mysteries of Paris and the 
Trovatore), Flores Tropicas, Yo soy un Angel (I am an angel, which is 
modest), La Fragrancia, La Dignidad, La Aprobacion, and La Flor de 
Eustaquio Barron. After pears, tulips, and race-horses, the nomencla- 
ture of cigars is certainly the most copious in art-manufacture. 



96 UNDER THE SUN 



cent for Italy and other fractional consumers of real 
cigars; and yet the Italians are the most inveterate 
smokers in Europe. They prefer, however, their own 
home-made Cavours, which are a halfpenny apiece 
and slowly poisonous, to the more wholesome but 
more expensive Cabana. 

I forgot to state that, before I left the Cabana 
premises, I smoked and enjoyed very much a full- 
flavoured regalia, for whose structure I had myself 
selected the leaves, and which I saw rolled, shaped, 
gummed, and pointed, with my own eyes. It was 
like being at Joe's, in Finch-lane. 



HAVANA CIGAEITOS. 

Whereabouts, I wonder, did those wonderful liter- 
ary gentlemen of the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries, who were in the habit of writing epic 
poems, and more amazing still, who persuaded people 
into reading them, keep the Muse whom they so 
frequently invoked ? Did she stand at livery, with 
Pegasus, and the bird of Jove, and Juno's peacocks, 
and Phoebus' s fiery steeds, and other curiosities of 
natural history, always ready to be trotted out when 
it occurred to the literary gentlemen that a Some- 
thingiad in Twelve Cantos would be precisely the 
kind of thing to take the town, make the fortune of 
Mr. Osborn or Mr. Tonson, or extract a score of gold 
pieces from the Peer of the Kealm and Patron of the 
Muses to whom the Somethingiad was to be dedi- 
cated ? I want to know what that Muse did when 
she wasn't under process of invocation. It is my 
opinion that she was a lazy Muse ; for we frequently 
find the literary gentlemen bidding her, with some 
sharpness, Arise, or Awake, or Tell, or Say some- 
thing which, according to their divination, she had to 
communicate. She seems also to have been a Muse 

H 



98 UNDER THE SUN 

who had something to give, and was worth flatter- 
ing ; since the literary gentlemen often addressed 
her by such endearing epithets as Gentle, Heavenly, 
Benign, and Discreet. But they never tojcl an} 7 body 
where the Muse lived, or how she was to be 'got 
at.' I fear she was to be heard of most frequently 
in the neighbourhood of Grub-street, at the sign of 
the Satchel, where the Greek translators lay three in 
a bed, and the gentleman who did Pindaric odes 
could only go out on Sundays through terror of the 
bailiffs, and the watchful landlady kept the ladder 
of the cockloft occupied by the Scholar and Divine 
who did High Church polemics for Mr. Lintot for 
half- a-cr own a sheet. We have been told a vast deal 
within these latter days about the Curiosities, the 
Pursuits, the Amenities, the Miseries, of literature ; 
but the polite world has yet much to learn concern- 
ing that Muse. Was her inspiration to be had for 
the paying for, and did she give credit ? By the bye, 
she was sometimes called Coy, and I have heard her 
designated as Intrepid ; but that was in a birthday 
ode about the battle of Dettingen. Her personal his- 
tory, manners, and customs, are, however, shrouded 
in mystery. The sum of what the literary gentle- 
men have told us in her regard is this : that she 
played upon a Lyre, and resided on a Mount. 

It is a very painful and humiliating thing to be 
fain to confess that, on the threshold of an article 
which will not contain one line of poetry, but will 
be of the very plainest prose on the very plainest of 



HAVANA CIGARITOS. 99 

subjects, I would give my ears to find a Muse who, 
for a reasonable consideration, would permit me to 
invoke her, and would Inspire my Lay, and enable 
me to get to the end of it without committing five 
hundred blunders. Is there a Muse of Memory ? I 
am afraid there is not : but it is a Muse of that kind 
I wish to apostrophise. And if I addressed her as 
Snuffy, or as Smoky, or even as Cloudy, I should 
be deemed either stupid or irreverent. Still, I desire 
no less than a Muse who is given to taking tobacco, 
a Muse who smokes a pipe, a Muse who can twist a 
cigarito ; but chiefly a Muse who will make me 
remember things. It is my ardent wish to return 
once more to the island of Cuba, and to relate as 
much as I can call to mind about the famous cigars 
of Havana. I mentioned recently that I was a tee- 
totum. I have spun round most violently since 
I last took that liberty. Dear me ! where is Havana 
and all my lore about cigars ? My note-book is at 
the bottom of the Lake of Garda ; and I know that 
I began an article on cigars, one morning, at Trieste, 
wrote the next paragraph at Milan, and cancelled 
both, as too digressional, at Samaden, in the canton 
of the Grisons. Just now, as I sit down despondingly, 
and wish I had attended the lectures of the professor 
who discourses on memory at the Royal Polytechnic 
Institution, the bells of Santa Maria clella Salute at 
Venice strike twelve at midnight, and my Muse, 
hitherto coy to churlishness, appears, and grants me 
all I wish. She is a nut-brown Muse — nay, darker 



ioo UNDER THE SUN 

than the nut : as dark as chocolate. She is round, 
and smooth, and graceful, and is deliciously fragrant. 
I take her up very tenderly between my finger and 
thumb, and pressing her to my lips, bite off her nose. 
Then do I apply the flame of a waxen taper to her 
feet, and I begin to smoke my Muse. Straightway, 
in the spiral whirls of blue incense curling from my 
last cigar, the inspiration which I needed glides softly 
down upon me. Cuba comes back. The ghosts of 
a hundred memories start up, and drum cheerfully 
on the lids of rose-coloured coffins. Wars and 
rumours of wars, camps, cities, seas, storms, and 
sick-beds, all fade away, and here I am in the Calle 
del Teniente Key at Havana, bargaining with a 
volante- driver to take me and a companion to the 
great tobacco-factory of La Honradez. 

I remember it all. I went over the establish- 
ment, say only yesterday. First, we found out a 
dark counting-house in a darker street down town : 
both made artificially sombre by screens and curtains 
— for the sun was salamandering about with his 
usual ferocity outside — and sought Don Domingo. 
Most courteous of clerks in a Cuban banking-house 
was he. A tawny man with a close-cropped head of 
silver-gray, like an over-ripe orange slightly mil- 
dewed at top, his thews and sinews all dried in the 
sun, like South American dried beef, but given, like 
that under the action of warm water, to become 
quite soft and tender when you were admitted to his 
intimacy. Don Domingo was intimately acquainted 



HAVANA CIGARITOS. 101 

with the proprietors of La Honradez. To judge 
from the very high-dried odour which continually 
hung about him, he must have spent at La Hon- 
radez, himself, a handsome annual income in snuff 
and cigars. He gave us a Regalia apiece, to keep us 
in good spirits until we reached the factory, and then 
we picked our way through a maze of packing-cases 
and strong boxes, and reaching La Calle del Te- 
niente Rey, bargained, as I have said, with a volante- 
driver, and were soon set down before the portal of 
which we were in quest. 

I think the place had been, prior to the suppres- 
sion of the monastic orders, a convent. It was large 
enough to have been that, or a barrack, or a peni- 
tentiary. The walls were amazingly thick ; but the 
windows, few as they were in number, were neither 
so rare nor so thickly grated but that the odour of 
fresh-chopped tobacco came gushing through them, 
like telegraphic messages from the State of Virginia 
and the Vuelta de Abajo. Have you ever driven 
along the Paris Boulevards at very early morning ? 
Have you ever noticed the fragrance issuing from 
the cafes on your line of route — the smell of the 
coffee roasting and grinding for the day's consump- 
tion ? The gar 90ns bring their mills on to the pave- 
ment, and from six to seven a.m. the Boulevards 
smell like Mincing Lane. Substitute tobacco for 
coffee, and you have the street savour of La Hon- 
radez. Penetrating into the great courtyard, the 
aroma became, perhaps, a trifle too forcible. It was 



102 UNDER THE SUN 

as that, say, of the most delicate devil's dust thrown 
up by the sweetest shoddy mills. It was as though 
you were off some guano islands, the haunt only of 
birds of paradise. It is nevertheless certain that the 
air was laden with impalpable powder ; that a sirocco 
of small-cut speedily filled your mouth, ears, and 
nostrils, and the pores of your skin ; and that your first 
salutation to La Honradez was a violent fit of sneez- 
ing. The court-yard was full of broken boxes and 
the banana-leaf or maize-straw wrappers of tobacco 
bales, — tobacco long since minced, and twisted, and 
smoked. There was an immense deal of litter and 
rubbish about ; for, it must be owned, tidiness is not 
a thing you must expect to find in the tropics. There 
were also a number of the Sable Sons of Toil, and the 
Hapless Children of Bondage, lying about in attitudes 
suggestive to the artistic student of every conceiv- 
able variety of foreshortening. They were asleep, 
and dreaming, probably, of pumpkin. Slavery I 
hold to be the dreariest and most detestable of 
treadmills ; but in Cuba the thralls doonw i:o the 
degrading discipline of the c stepper' seem to be 
oftener off than on the wheel, and either exercise or 
the want of it has a tendency towards making them 
comfortably fat. As a rule, if at broad noonday you 
see a negro awake, he is Free. If asleep, he is a 
Slave. 

At La Honradez only cigarettes, cigaritos, pape- 
litos, or whatever else you choose to call the little 
rolls of tissue paper containing finely chopped smok- 



HAVANA CIGARITOS 103 

ing tobacco, are made. The process is very simple ; 
and we took the place only as a whet or relish before 
the more serious tobacco banquet which we were 
subsequently to enjoy at the great cigar manufactory 
of — Cabana. 

We passed through numbers of barn-like rooms, 
vast and dim, where, squatting on the floor in groups, 
negro men, women, and children were sorting the 
tobacco, stripping the leaves from the stalks, and 
arranging them in baskets for the chopping-mills. 
There exists a notion that any kind of tobacco is 
good enough to make cigaritos with, and that, on the 
principle said to be adopted in some sausage-making 
establishments, anything that comes near enough to 
the machine, be it beef, or pork, or a dog, or a cat, 
or a man, is forthwith sucked into the vortex, and 
converted into polonies or saveloys. This notion, so 
far as it regards cigaritos, is, I am happy to believe, 
groundless. 

Very great care seemed to be taken in the assort- 
ment of the leaves and the selection of the prime 
parts ; and I was assured that the paper cigars of 
La Honradez were made from the choicest Havana 
tobacco obtainable. They are, certainly, very de- 
licious to smoke. La Honradez is, itself, modestly 
conscious of its own merits, and on the little chromo- 
lithographed wrappers which surround each bundle 
of twenty-five cigaritos you read this motto : i Mis 
hechos mi justificaran' — c My works shall justify me.' 
Other factories are more self-laudatory and less 



104 UNDER THE SUN. 

modest. ' Todos mi elogian' — ' All praise me,' says 
one, on its wrappers. This may be true, only the 
establishment ought not to say so. 'Mi fame per 
l'orbe vuela' — 'My fame is world-wide,' exclaims a 
third. This, again, is a little too self-asserting ; for 
I would bet a reasonable number of gold ounces that 
my present respected reader never heard of that 
particular establishment for making cigaritos. 

The paper cigars of Havana are not perfect 
cylinders, closed at one end with a dexterous twist, 
and provided at the other with a mouthpiece of 
twisted cardboard and a morsel of cotton wool to 
absorb the essential oil. Those are the famous Rus- 
sian cigarettes, made at St. Petersburg or Moscow, 
of Turkish, Syrian, and Bessarabian tobacco. The 
Havana cigaritos consist mostly of so much finely- 
chopped tobacco placed in the middle of a little 
square of very thin paper, neatly rolled up into 
batons about an inch and a half long and an 
eighth of an inch thick, and closed at each end. 
The art of making them lies in there being just 
enough loose paper at the ends, but no more, to 
make the required twist, and in there being a per- 
fectly homogeneous consistency of tobacco through- 
out the entire length. If the roll be too tight, or 
if, on the other hand, the tobacco be not evenly 
distributed, and it bulges in one part and is loose 
in another, the cigarito is useless. Indeed, it must 
be made with almost perfect nicety, to satisfy con- 
sumers : for almost every Spaniard has in his own 



HAVANA CIGARITOS. 105 

fingers an innate gift for twisting and rolling his 
own cigaritos. We have grown quite familiar, 
owing to the French c sans nom' paper which, 
for a season or two, obtained immense vogue in 
Paris, with the tiny blank books from which leaves 
of tissue paper could be torn to serve as envelopes 
for the tobacco. Neither the French nor the Ger- 
mans, however, ever attained great proficiency in 
this most difficult and delicate art. The Italians 
abominate cigaritos, preferring to smoke the more 
abominable cigars of native manufacture ; and I 
think that the majority of Englishmen could more 
easily learn to curl hair or play on the mandolin — 
two arts in which they are never very likely to excel 
— than to roll cigarettes. To the Spaniard the trick 
comes naturally. He would roll up a papelito and 
twist it faultlessly, in a third-class carriage in the 
middle of the Box Tunnel. The old Spaniards, how- 
ever, it must be owned, are the best hands, or rather 
the best digits, at papelito making. The tropics l take 
it out ' of a man, and the Creole Cuban is fain to allow 
his slaves to manufacture his cigars for him. More- 
over, in Cuba, cigarettes are but a pastime. His 
real repast is in the Puros, or Havanas of the weed 
itself; whereas in Old Spain, genuine Havanas are, 
through the idiotic financial policy of the govern- 
ment, so difficult to obtam, and cigars of native 
manufacture are so execrable, that the Castilians 
smoke cigaritos in self-defence. 

Picking, sorting, and chopping tobacco, and pack- 



106 UNDER THE SUN. 

ing it up in the little squares of tissue paper, consti- 
tute only one section of the art cultivated at La 
Honraclez. Some hundreds of young women and 
children, blacks, mulattoes, and quadroons, are em- 
ployed in cutting and folding the paper, and in pack- 
ing the cigarettes into bundles and gumming the 
wrappers. These wrappers themselves necessitate 
the maintenance of a very large chromo-lithographic 
establishment; and in an airy studio — the sun's rays, 
however, tempered by screens of white gauze — we 
found a number of Creole Spaniards at work, busily 
designing on stone the fantastic devices and pretty 
little vignettes, enveloped in which the far-famed 
cigaritos of La Honradez go forth to the world. The 
workmen who print these designs in colours, and 
manage a very elaborate steam lithographic press 
(made, as I deciphered from a cast-iron inscription, 
at Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, United States), are a 
very odd kind of people indeed. They are not 
negroes, they are not mulattoes, they are not quad- 
roons, still less are they criollos or Creole Cubans, 
or Peninsulares, that is to say, European Spaniards. 
They are not precisely Slaves ; yet they cannot ex- 
actly be termed Free. There is one of these odd 
workmen perched on a high stool by the side of the 
machine, and intent on adjusting the pins to the due 
and proper register of one of the coloured wrappers. 
He is a limber-limbed young fellow, very thin, with 
very long slender fingers, the which, with patient 
deftness, he knows well how to use. His complexion 



HAVANA CIGARITOS. 107 

is of uniform pale saffron, of the texture of parch- 
ment, and he is perfectly beardless. He has very 
long lustrous black hair falling over his shoulders. 
In the centre of his countenance, which, in its yellow 
smoothness, does not ill resemble a boiled batter- 
pudding, show, like currants in the said pudding, a 
pair of little sharp black eyes. His forehead is very 
low, his cheek bones are very high, and about his 
lips there lingers continually a scarcely definable yet 
ineffable simper of complacent beatitude, due, per- 
haps, to an inward consciousness of merit, or to 
opium, or to sheer innate imbecility. 

Where have you seen that parchment face, those 
eyes, that upturned calmly conceited smirk, before ? On 
a tea-tray ? On a tea-chest ? On a fan ? On a rice-paper 
view of the Porcelain Pagoda at Nankin ? To whom, 
in fine, should those features and that complexion be- 
long, but to a Brother of the Sun and Moon, a native 
of the Flowery Land, a native of the Celestial empire? 
They appertain, indeed, here to a Chinese coolie. 
"Where, you may ask, are his shaven poll and his pig- 
tail? That question is easily answered. The coolies 
in Havana let their hair grow, and are soon persua- 
ded to discard their umbrella hats, nankeen knicker- 
bockers, and bamboo shoes, for the ordinary white 
linen habiliments of the West Indies. More than this, 
and, strange enough to say, they do frequently submit 
to be baptised, to change their Celestial designations 
for names taken from the Christian hagiology, and so 
become, to all outward appearance, very decent Ro- 



io8 UNDER THE SUN 

man Catholics. Among Protestants, in California and 
Australia, the Chinaman clings most tenaciously to 
his native idolatry and his native customs, which are 
very nasty. He sticks to his pigtail, he sets up his 
joss-house, he burns perfumed paper to c the gods of 
genteel morals,' he eats with chopsticks, and even im- 
ports dried ducks, and other culinary offal, from Can- 
ton or Chusan, to feed upon. But in Cuba, no sooner 
does he submit his queue to the barber's shear, and 
allow the priest to change his name from Kwang- 
Lew-Fung to Jose Maria, than he becomes at least as 
good a Christian as the negro : which is not saying 
much. To the end of the chapter, however, he re- 
mains essentially an odd fish. He is a capital work- 
man, patient, cheerful, cunning, and industrious 
enough when he chooses; but he does not always 
choose, and is subject to capricious intervals of mon- 
key-like laziness, and of a disposition to mutiny: 
always in a restless, spiteful, monkey -like manner. It 
is quite useless to reason with him, for he has his own 
notions of logic and his own code of ethics. By the 
law he cannot be flogged; but his masters sometimes 
take the law into their own hands. If he be thrashed, 
he goes out and commits suicide. He whose fore- 
fathers may have been over-civilised some thousands of 
years ago, and the negro, who seems never to have 
been civilised at all since the world began, are about 
the most hopelessly impracticable beings ever created 
to be the curse and despair of philanthropists and mis- 
sionaries. The more honour, perhaps, to the courage 



HAVANA CIGARITOS. 109 

and devotion of the missionaries and philanthropists 
who persist in trying to reclaim the irreclaimable, and 
to wash the blackamoor white, and to take away the 
spots from the leopard. Brave hearts ! May they go 
on trying, and never say die ! 

There are two hundred thousand of these coolies, 
it is said, in Cuba. The vast majority of them are 
4 up the country,' in the tobacco and sugar plantations. 
They are the substitute for slavery, as electroware is 
the substitute for silver. They are as difficult to keep 
in good order, and as generally unsatisfactory, as sub- 
stitutes for anything are generally found, on trial, to 
be. In the towns they are employed to a considerable 
extent as mechanics and as cooks ; in more than one 
private house I have found Chinese footmen and body- 
servants. They are said to be not unlike cats in their 
characters : necessary, harmless — till they are crossed 
— sharp, quiet, noiseless, contemplative, and very de- 
ceitful. There is a kind of jail or market for coolies 
at a place called El Corro, near Havana, and there 
they are sold — I mean, there c contracts' can be made 
with their £ trustees' for their labour for a stated term. 
At El Corro you may see them in their native dress, 
and with their crowns shaven, all but a tuft on the 
top — the stumps of their departed tails. A coolie may 
be purchased or 'contracted' for, at a price varying 
between three and four hundred dollars. You are 
bound to pay the Chinaman you have bought four 
dollars per month, and to give him his victuals and 
two suits of clothes per year. For this he is bound 



UNDER THE SUN. 



to you for eight years. The contract is put in writing 
before a juez cle paz, and two copies are made, one 
in Chinese and the other in Spanish, to be kept re- 
spectively by the seller and the sold. The strongest 
guarantee for the Chinaman receiving decent treat- 
ment at the hands of his master is the almost cer- 
tainty of the former's committing suicide if he be 
beaten. Why the Celestial, who, in his own country, 
has been weaned on a course of bamboo, and has 
'eaten stick,' as the Arabs say, every day of his life, 
should so bitterly resent corporal punishment at the 
hands of the stranger, I am unable to explain. This, 
however, is the fact. 

For my part, I thought the Chinaman had done 
very well to change his name from Kwang-Lew- 
Fung to Jose Maria, and let his hair grow, and sit on 
a high stool printing coloured labels. Chromo-litho- 
graphy is one of the prettiest pursuits imaginable; 
and surely it was better to follow it here in peace, 
and with something like a hire for one's labour, than 
to be fishing for ducks from a barge on the Canton 
river, or painting miniatures on the cofim of your 
grandmother, against that respected person's decease, 
or addressing hieroglyphic compliments in Indian ink 
to 'the gods of genteel morals.' After all, the alcalde 
is preferable to the local mandarin, with his incessant 
bamboo. 

We went to see the place where the coolie work- 
men of the Honradez were lodged. The dormitories 
were, for Cuba, wonderfully clean and airy ; and under 



HAVANA CIGARITOS. nr 

proper discipline, I was told, the Chinaman could be 
made to observe extraordinary neatness and propriety. 
The beds, or bunks, were in tiers one above the other, 
as in a passenger steamer ; but were much more 
spacious. Every coolie had his locker for his clothes, 
and a shelf for his platter, pannikin, and clrinking-mug. 
Above every bunk was printed the name of its occu- 
pant. I read a most orthodox catalogue of Jose 
Marias, Andres, Augustins, Basilios, Benitos, Beltrans, 
Cristobals, Manuels, Eustaquios, Gils, Enriques, Jaco- 
bos, Pepes, Jaymes, Juans, Domingos, Lazaros, Mau- 
ricios, Pablos, Filipes, Rafaels, Estebans, Tadeos, To- 
mases, Vicentes, and Guillermos. There was one 
Esquilo, or iEschylus, and one Napoleone, who — the 
last — was described as the biggest rascal in the whole 
gang : the which reminded me that names very sel- 
dom suit their possessors, and that the only man I 
ever knew who had been christened Virgil was a 
most egregious donkey. 

We were not allowed to leave La Honradez with- 
out an 'obsequio' or complimentary offering, and, ac- 
cording to the etiquette of Spanish politeness, this 
backshish was administered in the most delicate and 
artful manner. We were asked to sign our names and 
addresses in the visitors' book, and then, on some pre- 
text or another, we were taken to a remote apartment. 
Just as we were quitting the establishment, and were 
thanking the superintendent for the great kindness 
and courtesy he had shown us, a coolie stepped for- 
ward, and, with a low bow and an inimitable simper, 



ii2 UNDER THE SUN 

presented each of our party with a packet of cigaritos, 
on whose labels, flourishing in chromo-lithography, 
were our Christian and surnames, printed at full 
length. The operation had been effected in about six 
minutes. It is certain that they have a very nice 
way of doing things in the West Indies and Mexico. 
Scarcely a day passed without somebody giving me 
something, and I came back to New York with a 
trunk full of ' obsequies/ 



A COURT- YARD IN HAVANA. 

I left my unworthy self and worthier friends and 
my trunks, so far as I can recollect, just discharged 
from a bullock-dray at the Fonda called El Globo, in 
the Calle del Obispo — let us say Bishopsgate- street — 
Havana. Something like four months have elapsed 
since I found that anchorage, and, glad enough to be 
in any soundings, ordered breakfast. El Globo — not 
that Cuban inn, but the real rotund habitable globe 
— has gone round in the maddest of gyrations since I 
began to talk of the Humours of Havana. I have been 
much tossed about, and am brought very low. It was 
at Berlin, in a house overlooking the bridge which has 
the statues of Peace and Plenty, and over against the 
great gilded dome of that Schloss which the Kings of 
Prussia find so gloomy that they are afraid to live in 
it, and have fled to a pleasant modern palace under 
the Linden — it was there, beneath the darkling sha- 
dow of the Prussian Eagle's wings, that I penned the 
last paragraph of my last paper about the Queen of 
the Antilles. Then the world began to roll, and the 
teetotum to spin again. Just as I was stepping into 
a train bound for St. Petersburg, a civil person in 
uniform put into my hand a telegram containing these 



xi 4 UNDER THE SUN 



simple words : ' Please go to Madrid. There is a Re- 
volution in Spain.' The next night I was in Cologne ; 
the morning after I was in Paris ; at night I supped 
at Dijon; next morning I breakfasted at Bordeaux, 
and lunched at Iran ; late in the evening a voice cried 
4 Valladolid,' and I had some chocolate; and the next 
dav, the fourth, being Sunday, I got to Madrid, and 
(it being a great saint's day) was just in time to take 
a ticket in a raffle for Saint Anthony's pig — el santo 
cochinillo, as they call him. I must tell you about 
that pig, some day. 

I put it to you, most forbearing of readers, how 
could I, being for the first time in my life in old Spain, 
take up at once the thread of my reminiscences of 
Spain the new ? Had I striven to do so, the result 
would have been but a sadly tangled skein. My con- 
science pricked me sometimes, I admit. Once I 
had a most dolorous twinge ; it was in an old library 
at Seville, and turning over a vellum-bound volume 
— Marco Polo's Travels I think — I came upon some 
marginal notes, written in Latin, and in a bold, 
honest hand. The old canon, who was my guide, 
reverently doffed his shovel-hat when the page full 
of marginal notes lay bare. 'They are worth ten 
thousand reals a letter,' quoth Don Basilio. ' Ten 
thousand! they are priceless. They are by the 
Great Admiral.' Yes, these were annotations to 
Marco Polo by Christopher Columbus. Of the au- 
thenticity of the autograph there was no doubt. The 
old library I speak of belonged to the Admiral's son r 



A COURT-YARD IN HAVANA. 115 

a learned, valorous, virtuous man, like his sire, and to 
the chapter of Seville cathedral he bequeathed all his 
books. I say my conscience smote me. How had I 
lingered over the humours of that Havana which Co- 
lumbus discovered ! There is a picture of the Admi- 
ral hung up in the library; a picture painted by a 
Frenchman, and presented to the chapter by Louis 
Philippe, in exchange for a choice Murillo. Out of the 
canvas the mild eyes seemed to look on me reproach- 
fully. I fancied the grave resolute lips moving, and 
that their speech ran : c What are you doing here ? 
Why don't you go back to Havana?' But it was no 
fault of mine. I was a teetotum ; and to wheel about 
and turn about was my doom. 

Coming out of that strange and fascinating land 
— the most comfortless and the most charming in the 
world — I sat down one day in the Frezzaria at Venice, 
and said, ' I really must go back to Havana.' So, 
taking hold of Old Spain, I cut its throat, and tied a 
Chubb's patent fireproof safe to its neck, and a couple 
of fifty-six pound shot to its legs, and, towing the 
corse out to the Lido, sank it just under the lee of 
the Armenian convent of St. Lazaro. It fell with a 
plash, and sank at once. ' Back to St. Mark's,' I cried 
to the gondolier; 'and lie there, Old Spain,' I con- 
tinued, apostrophising two or three ripples which 
played above the deed that I had done, as though 
murder were a thing to laugh at — ' lie there ; and the 
fishes may feed on you till I need your bones, and 
dredge you up again.' Old bones have their uses. 



n6 UNDER THE SUN 

Professor Liebig once stated that all Europe was ran- 
sacked to supply England with bones. I have marked 
the spot where my skeleton lies, full fathom five. 

But I could not, somehow, go back to Havana. 
Cuba was coy. She floated in the air ; she danced ; 
she smiled at me, but she would not be embraced. 
Like unto those strange apparitions which mock the 
shepherd's sight on the Westmoreland fells, now 
seeming as the form of one that spurs his steed mid- 
way along a hill, desperate — now merging into a 
gorgeous train of cavaliers, with glittering armour 
and waving standards — and now fading into vaporous 
nothingness, I could see, remote, intangible, the 
Phantom of the Antilles; the burnished sun, the 
coral glowing beneath the dark blue water ; the 
smooth black sharks waiting about the bathing-places, 
and raging at the walls of planks ; the waving palms, 
the sanguinolent bananas, the orange and pine-apple 
groves of the rich island. But she would not approach 
me then. You cannot always make of your mind 
an indexed ledger which you can open at will, and, 
under the proper letter, at the proper page, and in 
the proper column, find the matter you want, set 
down with clerk-like accuracy, underruled with red, 
and ticked off with blue ink. There are seasons 
when you mislay the key of the ledger, or find the 
leaves blotted, the index blurred, the entries effaced. 
Sometimes the firm your transactions with which 
you are desirous of recalling has gone bankrupt, and 
the accounts are being unravelled by Messrs. Cole- 



A COURT-YARD IN HAVANA. 117 

man, Turquand, and Young. Cuba, in short, would 
not come at call, and it was not until I embarked on 
the Adriatic, and went over to Trieste, whence, as 
you know, there are steamers starting continually 
for all parts of the world, that I began to feel a little 
tropical again, and find my Memory. 

The sea air did me good, and once more I began 
to remember ocean voyages and hot climes. But out 
upon that capricious memory and the skittish tricks 
it served me ! Like Leigh Hunt's pig, it went down 
'all manner of streets,' always excepting the very 
one I wished it to enter. ' Softly now, old girl,' I 
whispered coaxingly, and strove to tickle it towards 
the Morro Castle. Would you believe it, the vicious 
jade bolted right across the Mediterranean Sea, into 
the port of Algiers, and took me to a cock-fight. 
'Soho!' I said again, still trying soothing measures; 
4 this way, Memory, a little to the left ; now to the 
right; now straight on, and hey for the Gulf of 
Mexico!' Alas! when I had got Memory in mid- 
Atlantic, she turned to the north instead of the south, 
bore me up the River St. Lawrence, and cast me on 
the stony marge of Cuagnawagha. By dint of her- 
culean efforts I got the brute back to Vienna, in 
Austria; and, as luck would have it, hearing that a 
contingent of Austrian volunteers, bound to Mexico, 
was about to set sail, I hurried my Memory down to 
the coast, intending to leave her at Havana en route 
for Vera Cruz. At the eleventh hour a sharp note 
from Mr. Seward to Mr. Motley put a stop to the 



n8 UNDER THE SUN 



embarkation of the contingent destined to help Maxi- 
milian, the imperial gentleman in difficulties; but 
my Memory managed to get on board a transport 
in despite of the American taboo; and after one of 
the shortest passages on record, brought up safely 
in the Fonda called El Globo, Bishopsgate - street, 
Havana. 

They gave us a double-bedded room. Double- 
bedded! The apartment itself would have afforded 
ample quarters to five-and-twenty dragoons, horses, 
forage and all. It was very like a barn, and had an 
open timber roof, very massive, but very primitive 
in its framework. The beams, it is true, were of 
cedar, and smelt deliciously. I had no means of 
ascertaining the peculiar hue of the walls or of the 
floor, for beyond a narrow parallelogram of sunshine 
thrown on the latter, when the doors were open, the 
apartment was quite dark. It was one of a series 
surrounding the patio, or court-yard ; and the Cuban 
architects hold that windows in rooms which do not 
look upon the street are mere superfluities. Their 
constant care, indeed,, is not to let the daylight in, 
but to keep the sun out. The consequence is, that a 
room in a Cuban house is very like a photographic 
camera on a large scale. Magnify by twenty the 
pretty fresco-painted little dens which open out of 
the court-yard in the Pompeian house at the Crystal 
Palace, and you will have some idea of our double- 
bedded room at El Globo. By the bye, you must 
forget to sweep it, and you must be rather liberal in 



A COURT-YARD IN HAVANA. 119 

your allowance of fleas. What matter? I daresay 
there were fleas in the house of the Tragic Poet, 
notwithstanding all the fine frescoes, and that the 
Poinpeian housemaids were none too tidy. 

I was told afterwards that I might consider my- 
self very lucky not to find in this double-bedded 
room such additional trifles as a cow in one corner 
and a wheeled carriage in another. Spaniards, old 
or new, are but faintly averse from making a sleep- 
ing apartment of a stable or a coach-house. I was 
sIoav to believe this; and it was only lately, after 
some wayside experiences in Andalusia, and having 
shared a room with a pedlar's donkey, and being 
awakened in the morning by the hard, dry, sardonic 
see-saw of his horrible bray, that I realised to the 
fullest extent the strangeness of the bedfellows with 
which misery and the teetotum existence make us 
acquainted. 

Of the altitude of the folding-doors leading into 
this cave there was no complaint possible. I came 
to the conclusion that El Globo had formerly been a 
menagerie, and our room the private apartment of 
the giraffe, who, it is well known, is a very proud 
animal, and will never submit to the humiliation of 
stooping. The tallness of the doors, however, was 
balanced by the shortness of the beds. My com- 
panion was a long way over six feet in height, and 
the ghost of the celebrated Procrustes might have 
eyed him as his very long limbs lay on that very 
short pallet, and longed to reform his tailor's bills 



UNDER THE SUN 



by snipping off some superfluous inches of his an- 
atomy. As to my bed, it was as the couch of Dryden's 
Codrus — short, and hard, and miserable; the poet's 
bed, in fact, and a fit preparation for the flagstone, 
and the kennel, and the grave. 

But the Procrustean eye couldn't have seen that 
long-limbed captain overhanging the short bed. Why ? 
Because, when the folding-doors were shut, all, save 
a bright streak of sun or moonlight at their base, 
was utter darkness; and as soon as we kindled our 
wax-tapers at night the gnats or the moths, the bats 
or the scorpions, came and flapped the lights out. I 
don't know how the Cuban belles contrive to get 
through their toilettes. I think they must hang up 
screens of shawls in the patios, and come out into 
the open to beautify themselves. A Cuban bedroom 
is not a place whither you can retire to read or write 
letters. You may just stumble into it, feel your 
way to the bed, and, throwing yourself down, sleep 
as well as you can for the mosquitoes. Besides, the 
best part of your sleeping is done in Cuba out of 
your bedroom — in a hammock slung between the 
posts of a piazza, or on a mattress flung down any- 
where in the shade, or in anybody's arm-chair, or in 
the dark corner of any cafe, or anywhere else where 
the sun is not, and you feel drowsy. In Algiers, the 
top of the house, with a sheet spread between two 
poles by way of awning, is still the favourite spot 
for an afternoon nap, as it was in the time of the 
Hebrew man of old; but in Havana the house-tops 



A COURT-YARD IN HAVANA. 



slant, and are tiled, and so are left to their legitimate 
occupants, the cats. 

Our folding-doors proved but a feeble barrier 
against the onslaughts of a horse belongino; to the 
proprietor of El Globo, and whose proper stabling 
was in a cool grot, with a vaulted roof — a kind of 
compromise between an ice-house, a coal-hole, and 
a wine-cellar. This noble animal, seemingly under 
the impression that he lived at number five — our 
number — made such terrific play with his hoofs 
against our portals on the first night of our stay, * 
that, remonstrating, we w r ere promoted to a room 
up-stairs, windowless, of course, but the door of 
which opened on the covered gallery surrounding the 
patio. This dwelling, likewise, had the great ad- 
vantage of not being plunged in Cimmerian darkness 
directly the door was closed, for it boasted a kind 
of hutch, or Judas-trap, in one of the panels, after 
the fashion of the apertures in the doors of police- 
cells, through which cautious inspectors periodically 
peep, to make sure that female disorderlies have not 
strangled themselves in their garters. You might 
look from this hutch, too, if you chose, and present 
to the outside spectator the counterpart of the in- 
furiated old gentleman, presumably of usurious ten- 
dencies, in Eembrandt's picture, who thrusts his head 
through the casement^and grins at and exchanges 
savage glances with the young cavalier who has called 
to mention that he is unable to take up that little bill. 

Never, in the course of my travels, did I light 



122 UNDER THE SUN 

upon such a droll hotel as El Globo. You paid about 
thirty shillings a day for accommodation which would 
have been dear at half- a-cr own, but the balance was 
amply made up to you in fan. I had been living 
for months at the Bevoort House in New York, the 
most luxurious hotel, perhaps, in the world, and the 
change to almost complete barbarism was as amusing 
as it was wholesome. Amusing, for long-continued 
luxury is apt to become a very great bore — whole- 
some, because the discomfort of the Cuban hotels 
forms, after all, only an intermediate stage between 
the splendour of the States and the unmitigated 
savagery of Mexico and Spain. I was fated to go 
farther and fare worse than at El Globo. Our quar- 
ters there were slightly inferior to those to be found 
for fourpence in a lodging-house in St. Giles's; but 
I was destined to make subsequent acquaintance at 
Cordova, at Orizaba, at Puebla in America, and in 
Castile and in Andalusia in Europe, with other pig- 
sties to which that Havana was palatial. 

I am so glad that there was no room at Madame 
Alme's, and that we did not try Legrand's. I should 
have missed the sight of that patio at El Globo. It 
was open to the sky, of course; that is to say, the 
four white walls were canopied all day long by one 
patch of vivid ultramarine. A cloud was so rare, that 
when one came sailing over the expanse of blue, a 
sportsman might have taken it for a bird and risked 
a shot at it. I used often to think, leaning over the 
balusters of the gallery, how intolerable that bright 



A COURT-YARD IN HAVANA. 123 

blue patch would become at last to a man cooped up 
between the four white walls of a southern prison ; for 
suffering may be of all degrees, and anguish may wear 
all aspects. There is a cold hell as well as a hot 
one. I have seen the horrible coop under the leads 
of the Doge's palace at Venice, in which Silvio Pellico 
spent so many weary months. But he, at least, could 
see the roofs of the houses through his dungeon bars, 
and hear the gondoliers wrangling and jesting be- 
tween the pillars, or uttering their weird cries of 
warning as they turned the corners of the canals. 
He could hear the splashing of the water as the 
buckets were let down into the wells in the court- 
yard by the Giant's Staircase, and sometimes, per- 
haps, a few of the historical pigeons would come 
wheeling up from the cornices of the Procuratie 
Vecchie, and look at him in his cell, pityingly. But 
only to gaze on four white burning walls, and a 
great patch of ultramarine, and the chains eating 
into your limbs all the while ! Think of that. How 
the captive must long for the sky to be overcast, or 
for rain to fall — and it falls but once a year; and 
what a shriek of joy would come out of him were 
he to see, high aloft in the ultramarine, a real live 
balloon ! Such burning white walls, such an intoler- 
able patch of intense blue, must a prisoner by name 
Poerio have seen in Naples, in the old bad Bourbon 
time. 

There was nothing prison-like about our patio, 
however. It was as full of life as our bedrooms were 



124 UNDER THE SUN 

full of fleas. The oddest court-yard! — the most an- 
tique — the most grotesque. I used to liken it to that 
pound into which Captain Boldwig's keepers wheeled 
Mr. Pickwick while he got into that sweet slumber 
produced by too much milk- punch. It was strewn 
with all manner of vegetable and pomicultural refuse, 
great leaves of plantains, cocoa-nut shells, decayed 
pine-apples, exhausted melons, and husks of Indian 
corn. Havana is a great place for oysters, and the 
four corners of the ' pound ' were heaped high with 
votive offerings of shells. Nor to the pound was 
there wanting the traditional donkey. He would come 
strolling in three or four times a day, either bearing 
a pile of Indian corn about the size of an average hay- 
stack on his back, or with panniers full of oranges 
slung on either side of him. Occasionally a Pepe or 
a Jose, or some other criador, would come to unload 
him. Oftener he would unload himself, by rolling 
over on the ground, and tumbling his oranges about 
in all directions ; then a fat negress would emerge 
from the kitchen and belabour him about the head 
with a ladle ; then he would slink away to the cool 
grot where the horse lived, to confer with that animal 
as to any provender there might be about, and com- 
pare notes with him as to the growing depravity of 
mankind in general and Cuban costermongers in par- 
ticular. By this time his master would arrive with a 
sharp stick, or else the big bloodhound that lived in 
an empty sugar-cask, and so zealously licked all the 
plates and dishes either immediately before or imme- 



A COURT-YARD IN HAVANA. 125 

diately after they came from the table — I am not 
certain which — would become alive to the fact of 
there being a donkey in the camp, and i run him out' 
incontinent. 

How they managed to get rid of all those oranges 
I really do not know. I had a dozen or so brought 
me whenever I felt thirsty, and I daresay the other 
guests at El Globo were as often thirsty and as fond 
of oranges as I ; and there were a good many too cut 
up in the course of the day for the purpose of making 
sangaree and orange-toddy ; but even after these 
draughts the residue must have been enormous. You 
were never charged for oranges in the bill. They 
were as plentiful as acorns in a forest, and you might 
browse on them at will. In the streets, at every 
corner and under every archway, sits a negress who 
sells oranges, so they must have some monetary value, 
however infinitesimal; but if you bestow on her the 
smallest coin recognised by the Cuban currency you 
may fill your hands, your pockets, and your hat too, 
if you choose, with the golden fruit. When the Cuban 
goes to the bull-fight, he takes with him a mighty 
store of oranges tied up in a pocket-handkerchief, just 
as we, when boys, used to buy a pound of gingerbread- 
nuts, more as a precautionary measure than because 
we were sweet-toothed, on entering the confines of 
Greenwich Fair. Some of these oranges the amateur 
of the bull-fight eats ; but the major part he uses as 
missiles, and pitches into the ring, at a cowardly bull 
or clumsy toreadores. There is positively a verb 



126 UNDER THE SUN 

in the Spanish dictionary signifying to pelt with 
oranges. 

I mentioned the existence of a kitchen just now. 
It was a hot and grimy den, not much bigger than the 
stoke-hole of a locomotive ; and there was a charcoal 
stove the»e, I presume ; but the real culinary business 
was done in the patio. As to venture forth during the 
noonday or afternoon heats is considered next door 
to raving madness ; and as you necessarily spend much 
time within doors ; and as you feel too lazy to read, 
or write, or paint, or sew — what a blessing sewing- 
machines must be in Cuba ! before their introduction 
most of the needlework was done by Coolies — and as 
you cannot be always smoking, or dozing, or sipping 
sangaree ; and as billiards are out of the question, and 
as gambling — the real recreation in all tropical climes 
— is immoral, there are certain hours in the day when 
time is apt to hang heavy on your hands, and you 
don't know what the deuce to do with yourself. An 
infallible pastime to me was to lean over the gallery 
and watch the dinner being cooked in the patio. It 
has been said chat a wise man should never enter his 
wife's dressing-room, and it has been likewise re- 
marked that if we entered the kitchen of the Trois 
Freres half an hour before dinner, we should see such 
sickening sights as would cause us to lose all our 
appetite for the banquet served in the cabinet parti- 
culier up-stairs. We must look at results, says the 
sage, and not at the means employed to bring them 
about. But these sententious warnings should not 



A COURT-YARD IN HAVANA. 127 

apply, I think, to the cooking that is done in a 
patio — in the open, and under the glorious sunshine. 
There was a rollicking, zingaro-like freedom in thus 
seeing your meals prepared in broad daylight. Why 
did they cook in the court-yard ? Because the kitchen 
itself was too small, or because the gory sun came to 
the assistance of the charcoal embers and did half 
the cooking himself. I was told lately, and gravely 
too, at Seville — though the tale may be very likely 
one of the nature ordinarily told to travellers — that 
on the fourteenth day of July in every year there 
takes place in La Ciudad de las Maravillas an ancient 
and solemn ceremony in honour of Apollo — a kind of 
sun-worship, as it were : a culinary person, white- 
aproned and white-nightcapped, sets up a stall in La 
Plaza de la Magdalena, and produces a frying-pan, a 
cruse of oil, and a basket of eo-o-s. Two of the eggs 
he breaks ; sluices their golden yolks with oil, and 
then, with an invocation to the sun-god, holds the pan 
towards the meridian blaze. In forty-five seconds the 
eggs are fried. You must take these eo-gs, and the 
story too, with a grain of salt; but I can only repeat 
that Seville is a city of wonders, witness the two an- 
gelic sisters who, no later than the year 1848, sat on 
the weathercock of the Giralda, and spinning round 
and round while Espartero was bombarding the city 7 
warded off the iron storm from the sacred fane. 

Now, the sun of Andalusia, though a scorcher 
when considered from a European point of view, is a 
mere refrigerator when compared with the great fiery 



128 UNDER THE SUN 

furnace set up within the domains of the Southern 
Cross. I am not prepared to deny that the prepara- 
tion of some of the stews we had for dinner might 
have been accelerated by the monstrous kitchen-range 
overhead ; but I shrink from asserting as a positive 
fact that the old negress, who used to belabour the 
donkey with the ladle, fried her eggs in the sun. No, 
I will grant at once that her pots and pans were set 
upon little braziers full of hot ashes ; but still, with- 
out the sun, I don't think her viands would have been 
cooked to her or our liking. She evidently gloried in 
the sun, and frizzled in it, bareheaded, while her eggs 
and sausages frizzled in their own persons. Not till 
her work was done would she bind her temples with 
the yellow bandana, or the gorgeous turban of fla- 
mingo hue, and, sitting down in a rocking-chair, fan 
herself with a dignified air, as though she were the 
Queen of Spain and had no legs. The oscillations of 
the chair, however, proved the contrary. She had 
legs which Mr. Daniel Lambert might have beheld, 
not unenvious. Good old black cook ! She was like 
Sterne's foolish fat scullion dipped in a vat of Bruns- 
wick Black. She was gross and oily, and could ex- 
hibit a terrible temper, especially towards trouble- 
some piccaninnies and refractory fowls who showed 
an ungrateful unreadiness in being caught and 
strangled and plucked, and trussed and broiled, and 
served hot with mushrooms, all under half an hour's 
time ; but, her little irritation once over, she was — 
until a roving donkey called for the ministrations of 



A COURT-YARD IN HAVANA. 129 

the ladle — all grins and chuckles and broad guffaws 
and humorous sayings. She would sing a fragment 
of a song, too, from time to time — a wild song of 
Congo sound, and which needed the accompaniment 
of a banjo. The refrain had some resemblance to 
the word ipecacuanha pronounced very rapidly and 
with a strong guttural accent, and yet I daresay it 
was all about love, and the home of her youth on 
the burning banks of Niger. 

Where did all those piccaninnies come from ? Who 
owned them ? The landlord of El Globo was a bache- 
lor ; the waiters did not look like married men ; and 
yet, from the youthful brood strewn about the patio, 
you might have fancied Brigham Young to be the 
proprietor of the place. ' Strewn about' is the only 
term to use with reference to the piccaninnies. Their 
age averaged between twenty and thirty months. No- 
body nursed them ; they were too small to stand ; and 
so they sprawled, and crawled, and wriggled, and lay, 
and squalled, and kicked, and basked in the sun like 
little guinea-pigs. I have seen a piccaninny in a dish ; 
I have seen a piccaninny in a wooden tray, like a leg 
of pork just delivered by the butcher. They were of 
all colours — blue-black, brown-black, chocolate, bistre, 
burnt sienna, raw sienna, cadmium yellow, and pale 
Creole white. I am afraid all these piccaninnies, save 
those of the last-named hue, were Slaves, and the 
children of Slaves. Not one of the least suggestive — 
to some it may be one of the most painful — features 
of bondage is that free white and black slave children 



i 3 o UNDER THE SUN. 

grow up together in perfect amity and familiarity, 
are playmates, and foster-brothers and sisters. The 
great social gulf which is to yawn between them — so 
fair and jewelled with flowers on one side, so dark 
and hideous on the other — is in infancy quite bridged 
over. The black piccaninnies sprawl about the ve- 
randahs, and the court-yards, and the thresholds of 
the rooms of their owners; and the white piccaninnies 
sprawl in precisely the same manner. That fat old 
cook, for instance, made no more distinction between 
a white and a black urchin than between a black and 
a white fowl. Before ever she could address herself 
to the concoction of a dish, two ceremonies were gone 
through. A piccaninny had to be fed, and another 
piccaninny had to be c spanked.' For the purpose of 
feeding, that invaluable ladle, dipped in a bowl of saf- 
fron-coloured porridge, came into play; the 'spanking' 
was done with her broad black hand. She was quite 
impartial, and distributed the slaps and the spoonfuls 
in strict accordance with the maxims of equity. Thus, 
if a piccaninny yelped, it was fed ; but if it yelped 
after it was fed, it was spanked. And subsequent to 
both spooning and spanking, the fat old cook would 
catch the child up in her arms and sing to it a snatch 
of the famous song that ended with ipecacuanha. 

So have I seen many dinners cooked. So I have 

seen my made-dish running about the patio with 

flapping wings and dismal ' grooping ' noise, to be at 

* last caught and sacrificed to the culinary deities, and 

to appear at the evening meal, grilled, with rich 



A COURT-YARD IN HAVANA. 13 r 

brown sauce. And so at last the drama of the day 
would be played out ; and coming home late, and 
leaning once more over the rails of the gallery, I 
would gaze then on the patio all flooded in moonlight 
of emerald green : pots and pans and plates and crates 
and baskets and braziers and vegetable rubbish, all 
glinting and glancing as though some fairy 'property- 
man' had tipped their edges with the green foil-paper 
of the playhouse. 



THE VOLANTE. 

Are there any of us so high and mighty and wise 
and proud and philosophical as not to long for some- 
thing ? Until I read a novel called Barchester 
Towers, I never ventured to imagine that a being so 
ineffable as an English bishop could long for any- 
thing. Under the shovel-hat and silken apron, I 
thought, must dwell supreme indifference to the toys 
and gewgaws for which a grosser laity struggle and 
intrigue. Yet, what a delicate touch of the lancet 
between the under muscles of the human mind is 
that with which Mr. Trollope shows us poor little 
henpecked Dr. Proudie, in his grand palace at Bar- 
chester, longing, not for the see of Canterbury, not 
to be a second Wolsey or a new Ximenes, but merely 
to be able to write his sermons and sip his negus in 
a warm cosy large room above-stairs, from which he 
has been banished by his imperious bishopess. Yes ; 
a bishop may long. A bishop ! Who shall say that 
his Holiness the Pope has not coveted, within these 
latter years, the lot of one of his own flunkeys? It 
was in the disguise of a postillion that the poor old 
gentleman fled out of Rome in 1849. Quite feasible 
is it to surmise that his memory has oft reverted to 



THE VOLANTE. 133 



the day when he cracked his whip, and rose up and 
down in his saddle, mechanical, on the dusty road 
to Gaeta, and that, looking wearily on all his tiaras, 
and copes, and stoles, and peacocks' feathers, he has 
sighed, and thought that happiness might be found in 
an obscure post, good wages, a jacket with sugar-loaf 
buttons, and tight buckskin small-clothes. 

We generally long for the thing which we are 
least likely ever to possess. The ugly woman longs 
for beauty. The drunkard, in his waking moments, 
longs for the firm tread, clear eye, and assured 
speech, of the temperate ; and I have often conjec- 
tured that thieves are beset at times with a dreadful 
longing to become honest men. I was born to go 
afoot. When Fate condemned me to the footpath, 
she also presented me with a pair of bad legs ; for 
Fate seldom does things by halves. The consequence 
is, that I have always been longing to ride in a 
carriage of my own. Of my own, mind. Let that 
you have be yours and nobody else's. I have longed 
for my own carriage this many a year, and have 
gazed so enviously intent on some of my acquaint- 
ance riding high horses or careering along in the 
chariots of the proud, that my toes have been 
menaced by their chargers' hoofs, and my last car- 
riage has promised to be a stretcher to convey me 
to the hospital after being run over. My longings 
vehiculary have been catholic, and perhaps a little 
capricious. In childhood I longed for the lord 
mayor's coach, so grand, so golden, so roomy. What 



J34 UNDER THE SUN 

happiness was his who, with a fur porringer on his 
head, and a sword held barton-wise, looked from that 
coach- window like Punch from a glorified show ! 
There was a story related to my detriment during 
nonage, that I once expressed a longing for a mourn- 
ing coach. I will own that the cumbrous sable 
wagon, so repulsive to most persons, exercises over 
me to this day a strange fascination, and that I have 
some difficulty in refraining from stealing down the 
stable-yards of funeral postmasters and peeping into 
the stuffy cloth caverns, and seeking for strange 
sights in the shining black panels, as the super- 
stitious seek for apparitions in the drop of ink of the 
Egyptian magician, and wondering at the uncouth 
leather springs and braces, and watching the har- 
nessing of the long- tailed round -barrelled Flemish 
steeds, with their obsolete surcingles and chestbands. 
The which leads me, with a blush, to admit that 
there may be some truth in the report that in youth 
'my sister Emmeline and I' — her name was not 
Emmeline — were in the habit of performing funerals 
in the nursery, and playing at Mr. Shillibeer. 

But these, and the glorious mail-coach, with the 
four thoroughbreds, and a guard and coachman in 
blazing scarlet and gold, and the bran-new harness 
and reins, which used to burst on our sight on the 
evening of the king's birthday long bygone — these 
were but childish longings, airy desires akin to that 
which children show for the Eoyal Arms on a shop- 
front, or the moon in a pail of water. Not until 



THE VOLANTE. 135 



manhood did I feel that full fierce longing, the long- 
ing which is mingled with discontent, and is own 
brother to envy, malice, and all uncharitableness. 
I have given the Drive in Hyde Park a wide berth, 
and have gone out of my way to avoid Long-acre. 
The sight of other people's carriages made me sick. 
I never owned so much as a one-horse chaise. I 
have not even a perambulator. 

My longing has varied with the countries in 
which it has been my lot to long. I have longed 
for a droschky with a bearded Istvostchik in a braided 
caftan and a long-maned alezan from the Ukraine 
in the shafts. There is a droschky, I think, among 
the specimens of wheeled carriages in the Crystal 
Palace, but I never longed for an Istvostchik at Sy- 
denham. I coveted the Russian vehicle only while 
I was on Russian soil. When I went away, I began 
to long for something else. Kor, I fear, shall I ever 
possess a droschky of even the humblest kind, which 
is nothing but a cloth-covered saddle, on which you 
sit astride, with splash-boards to protect you from 
the wheels ; for in the latest edition of Murray I 
learn that droschkies are going out of fashion, and 
that the Petersburg railway stations are now beset 
by omnibuses and hack cabs. I never longed for 
an Irish outside car, although 1 have seen some 
pretty private ones ; and crinoline may be displayed 
in its widest sense and to its greatest advantage on 
a 'kyar,' say between two and five in the afternoon, 
in Grafton-street, Dublin. My soul has often thirsted 



136 UNDER THE SUN. 



for a private Hansom. What luxury in the know- 
ledge that those high wheels, that stiff and shiny 
apron, all belong to you ! I think I would have a 
looking-glass in the splash-board, in lieu of Mr. Map- 
pin's proclamation of the goodness of his knives, and 
I am sure I should be always pushing open that trap 
in the roof and bidding the cabman drive faster. 
And I have longed for a mail phaeton — not so much 
for the sake of the two proud steppers and the trim 
lamps with their silvered reflectors, as for the sake of 
the two grooms who, in black tunics, cockaded hats, 
white neckcloths, and pickle-jar boots, sit in the 
dicky with their arms folded, like statues of Discipline 
and Obedience. I knew a gentleman in the city of 
Mexico, and he owned such a mail phaeton with two 
such statuesque grooms as I have described. Little 
did he reck, good hospitable man, that the guest he 
was wont to drive out in the Paseo de la Vega envied 
him, with a green and spotted jealousy, his mail 
phaeton and his trim grooms. He had encountered 
the most appalling difficulties before he could find 
two human beings who, even after lon^ drilling and 
for liberal wages, could be induced to sit in the dicky 
— or is it the rumble ? — and fold their arms without 
moving. The Mexicans are a very busy people ; but 
neither the Spaniards, nor the half-castes, nor the 
Indians, understand sitting behind a horse. They 
prefer sitting across him. My friend sent to the 
United States for grooms. They returned him word 
that there were no grooms in the Union who would 



THE VOL ANTE. 137 



fold their arms. A lawsuit took hini to New York, 
and he had another mail phaeton built for the Cen- 
tral Park ; but the grooms were still lacking. He 
tried Irishmen, and he tried negroes. Tempted by 
abundant dollars, they would consent to wear the 
cockaded hats and the pickle-jar boots, but they 
could not be brought to fold their arms. To attempt 
to subject a native American citizen to this indignity 
was, of course, out of the question. When I remark 
that I have seen a citizen clad in a red shirt and 
a white hat driving a hearse at a public funeral, you 
will recognise the impossibility of any statuesque 
arrangements in connection with mail phaetons in 
the States. 

For any native Yankee carriage I never longed. 
I held the Noah's-ark cars on the street railways in 
horror, and considered the Broadway stages as abo- 
minations. As for a trotting c wagon ' — by which is 
meant a hard shelf on an iron framework between two 
immense wheels, to which a railway locomotive at 
high pressure, but disguised as a horse, has been har- 
nessed — I never could appreciate the pleasure of be- 
ing whirled along at the rate of about eighteen miles 
an hour, with the gravel thrown up by the wheels 
flying about you, now bombarding your eyes, and 
now peppering your cheeks. Thoroughly do I agree 
with the general criticism passed on trotting wagons 
by an old steamboat captain who had endured for 
a couple of hours the agony of the iron shelf. c The 
darned thing,' he remarked, 'has got no bulwarks.' 



138 UNDER THE SUN ' 

There is rather a pretty American carriage called a 
Eockaway — not from any peculiar oscillatory mo- 
tion it possesses, but from a watering-place hight 
Eockaway, where it was first brought into use. The 
Eockaway is in appearance something between the 
French panier a salade, in which the garcons de 
bureau of the Bank of France speed on their bill- 
collecting missions, and the spring cart of a fashion- 
able London baker. Add to this a grinning negro 
coachman, with a very large silver or black- velvet 
band to a very tall hat, and the turn-out, you may 
imagine, is spruce and sparkling. But I never longed 
for a Eockaway. The American carriage-horses are 
the prettiest creatures imaginable out of a circus, and 
are as prettily harnessed. They are almost covered 
in summer with a gracefully fantastic netting, which 
keeps the flies from them. 

Much less have I yearned for one of the Hun- 
garian equipages, about which such a fuss is made 
in the Prater at Vienna. An open double or triple 
bodied rattle-trap, generally of a gaudy yellow, with 
two or four ragged spiteful profligate -looking little 
ponies, and the driver in a hybrid hussar costume — 
a feather in his cap, sky-blue tunic and pantaloons, 
much braiding, and Hessian boots with long tassels. 
This is the crack Hungarian equipage, the Magyar 
name of which I do not know, nor knowing could 
pronounce. The Viennese hold this turn-out to be, 
in the language of the mews, very ' down the road ;' 
but it fails to excite my longing. Hungarian ponies 



THE VOL ANTE. 139 



look wild and picturesque enough in Mr. Zeitter's 
pictures ; but a gipsy's cart without the tilt is not 
precisely the thing for Hyde Park ; and the ' proud 
Hungarian' on the box-seat reminds me too forcibly 
of the ; Every thingarian,' who in cosmopolitan saw- 
dust continues the traditions of equitation handed 
down by the late Andrew Ducrow. 

When, in the days of Donna Isabella, I was looking 
from a balcony, overhanging the Puerta del Sol, in 
Madrid, and used to hear, at about three in the after- 
noon, the clangour of trumpets from the guard-house, 
at the Casa de la Gobernacion opposite, as the car- 
riages of the royal family, with their glittering escort, 
drove by to the Prado or the Retiro, I would question 
myself as to whether I felt any longing for the absolute 
possession of one of those stately equipages. I don't 
think I did. They were too showy and garish for 
my humble ambition. If a slight feeling of longing 
came over me, it was for the coach which conveyed 
the junior branches of the royal family. Imagine, if 
you please, a spacious conveyance all ablaze with 
heraldic achievements, and crammed to the roof with 
little infantes and infantas ; Mr. Bumble on the 
coach-box ; and the beadles of St. Clement's Danes, 
the ward of Portsoken, and the Fishmongers' Com- 
pany, hung on behind, abreast — for long laced coats 
and huge laced cocked-hats are the only wear of 
flunkeydom in Spain. Harnessed to this astounding* 
caravan were six very sleek, very fat, and very super- 
cilious-looking mules. To the beadles before and the 



Ho UNDER THE SUN 

beadles behind must be added the beadle of the Bur- 
lington Arcade, on the off-leader, as postillion. Yea, 
more. The beadle of the Royal Exchange trotted on 
an Andalusian barb as outrider. A squadron of 
lancers followed, to take care that the infantes 
and infantas were not naughty, or that the naughtier 
Progresistas didn't run away with them. On the 
whole, I don't think I longed much for this sump- 
tuous equipage. There is another coach, in the 
royal stables at Madrid, much more in my line — a 
queer cumbrous, gloomy litter, with a boot as big as 
a midshipman's chest. It is a very old coach — the 
oldest, perhaps, extant, and nearly the first coach 
ever built, being the one in which Crazy Jane, Queen 
of Castile and Aragon, used to carry about the 
coffined body of her husband, Charles of Anjou. 

There is yet another coach in my line — the Shil- 
libeer line, I mean — which may be hired for a franc 
an hour at a certain city on the Adriatic sea, opposite 
Trieste. There are about four thousand of those 
coaches in the city — a very peculiar city, for the sea 
is in its broad and its narrow streets, and the sea- 
weed clings to the door-steps of its palaces. How I 
have longed to have one of those coaches for my 
own private riding ; say in the Surrey Canal or on 
the Serpentine ! The Americans have got one in 
the lake in their Central Park ; but the toy once 
placed there has been forgotten, and it is dropping 
to pieces. It is the only coach of which use is prac- 
ticable in Venice. It is black, and shiny, and hearse- 



THE VOLANTE. 141 



like, and its roof bristles with funereal tufts, and the 
carving about its doors and panels is strictly of the 
undertaker's order of decoration. It is called a 
gondola. 

But where would be the use of a gondola in 
London? The Surrey Canal is not in a fashionable 
district, and the Serpentine has no outlet. The chief 
purpose of your own carriage, I presume, is to drive 
about to the residences of your friends and acquaint- 
ances, and strike despair into their souls by flashing 
your liveries and appointments in their eyes. You 
could scarcely put your gondoliers into buckskins 
and pickle -jar boots, although, upon my word, I 
remarked once, at Venice, that the Count of Cham- 
bord, otherwise the Duke of Bordeaux, otherwise 
Henry the Fifth, King of France and Navarre — who 
lived, when he was not at Frohsdorff, at one of the 
most beautiful palaces on the Grand Canal, and kept 
half a dozen gondolas for his private recreation — had 
been absurd enough to dress up his boatmen in tail 
coats, gold-laced hats, plush breeches and gaiters. 
Truly, the Bourbons have learnt nothing, and for- 
gotten nothing. Incongruity of incongruities ! Ima- 
gine Jeames de la Pluche on the Grand Canal. 

As one could not drive down to Ascot in a gon- 
dola, or take it to the Crystal Palace on a half-crown 
day, or keep it waiting for an hour and a half at the 
door of a Pall Mall club — and as the linkman at the 
Royal Italian Opera would be slightly astonished at 
having to proclaim that Mr. Anonymous's gondola 



142 UNDER THE SUN 

stopped the way, I must abandon all hopes of pos- 
sessing a marine Shillibeer until I can afford to take 
a palace at Venice. 

But, if my longings are not to be satisfied in 
Europe, there is in the Spanish West Indies a carriage 
to be longed for : ay, and the longing may be gratified 
at a very moderate expenditure. In the city of Ha- 
vana, and in Havana alone, is to be found this turn- 
out. It is but a 4 one-hoss shay ;' but it is a chaise 
fit for princes and potentates to ride in. It is the 
queerest trap into which mortal ever mounted. It is 
unique and all but inimitable. Those who have 
visited Cuba will understand that I allude to the 
famous conveyance called the volante. 

The rooms looking on the street in Havana are 
necessarily provided with windows, but these case- 
ments are garnished with heavy ranges of iron bars, 
behind which you sit and smoke, or eat, or drink, or 
yawn, or flirt your fan, or transfix the male passers- 
by with dreamy, yet deadly, glances, precisely as 
your habits, or your sex, or the time of the day may 
prompt you. Skinny hands are often thrust between 
these bars ; and voices cry to you in Creole Spanish 
to bestow alms for the sake of the Virgin and the 
Saints. Sometimes rude boys make faces at yon 
through the gratings, or rattle a bamboo cane in dis- 
cordant gamut over the bars, till you grow irritable, 
and begin to fancy that Havana is a zoological garden, 
in which the insiders and outsiders have changed 
places; that you have been shut up in the monkey- 



THE VOLANTE. 143 



house; and that the baboons are grimacing at you 
from the open. I was sitting at the grated window 
of El Globo's restaurant after breakfast, dallying with 
some preserved cocoa-nut, a most succulent ' goody,' 
and which is not unlike one of the spun-glass wigs 
they used to exhibit at the Soho Bazaar, dipped in 
glutinous syrup, when, across the field of vision 
bounded by the window-pane, there passed a negro, 
mounted on horseback. The animal was caparisoned 
in blinkers, and a collar, and many straps and bands, 
thickly bedight with silver ornaments : which I 
thought odd in the clothing of a saddle-horse. But it 
might be un costumbre del pais, I reflected; just such 
another custom as that of plaiting up the horse's tail 
very tightly, adorning it with ribbons, and tying the 
end to the saddle-bow. An absurd custom, and a 
cruel custom; for in the tropics the horse's tail was 
obviously given him for the purpose of whisking away 
the flies, which sorely torment him. The black man 
bestriding this tail-tied horse grinned at me as he 
rode by, touched his hat, and made a gesture as 
though of inquiry. That, also, I conjectured to be a 
Cuban custom. Those big placable unreasoning 
babies, called negroes, are always grinning and bow- 
ing, and endeavouring to conciliate the white man, 
whom they respect and fear, and love, too, after a 
fashion. This was a stately black man — a fellow of 
many inches, muscular, black as jet, and shiny. He 
wore a straw hat with a bright ribbon, a jacket of 
many colours, a scarlet vest, white breeches, very 



144 UNDER THE SUN 



high jack-boots — so at least they seemed to me — with 
long silver spurs, and large gold rings in his ears. 
He carried a short stocked whip, with a very long 
lash of many knots, and he rode in a high demi-peaked 
saddle, with Moorish stirrups, profusely decorated, like 
the harness, with silver. I could not quite make him 
out. The Postillion of Longjumeau, a picador from 
the bull-ring, Gambia in the Slave on horseback, 
struggled for mastery in his guise. He moved slowly 
across the window, and I saw him no more. I forgot 
all about this splendid spectre on horseback, and re- 
turned to my dalliance with the preserved cocoa-nut. 
Time passed. It might have been an hour, it might 
have been a minute, it might have been a couple of 
seconds — for the march of time is only appreciable in 
degree, and is dependent on circumstances — when, 
looking up from the cocoa-nut, I saw the plane of vision 
again darkened. Slowly, like the stag in a shooting- 
gallery, there came bobbing along a very small gig 
body, hung on yevy large C springs, and surmounted 
by an enormous hood. Stretched between the apron 
and the top of this hood, at an angle of forty-five de- 
grees, was a kind of awning or tent of some sable 
material. Glancing between the hood and the awning, 
I saw a double pair of white-trousered legs, while at a 
considerable altitude above, two spirals of smoke were 
projected into the air. 'Surely/ I exclaimed, 'they 
can never be so cruel as 'to make their negro slaves 
draw carriages.' I rose from the table, and, standing 
close to the bars, gained a view of the street pave- 



THE VOL ANTE. 145 



ment. But no toil-worn negro was visible, and, 
stranger to relate, no horse, only the gig body and a 
pair of wheels big enough to turn a paper mill, and a 
pair of long timber shafts, and a great gulf between. 
Mystery ! Was it an automaton, or Hancock's steam- 
coach come to life again? Had my field of view 
been less confined, I might have discovered that 
there was, indeed, a horse between the shafts, but 
that he was a very long way off. He was the identi- 
cal horse, in fact, ridden by the black postillion who 
had grinned at me. I had seen a Yolante. 

I became intimately acquainted with the volante 
ere I left Havana, and I learned to long for it. I 
have yet faint hopes of acclimatising it in Hyde 
Park. Some slight difficulty may be experienced in 
climbing into it, for the C springs are hung very high, 
and are apt to wag about somewhat wildly when 
the weight of one or two human bodies is pressed 
upon them. I would recommend a few weeks' prac- 
tice in climbing into a hammock ere the volante is 
attempted; but the ascent is, after all, much more 
facile than that to the knife-board of a London omni- 
bus. Once in the curricle, you are at your ease, and 
happy. You are rocked as in a cradle, and may 
slumber as peacefully as a baby ; or, if you choose to 
keep awake, you may catch glimpses, between the 
canopy of the hood which screens the nape of your 
neck and the crown of your head, and the black linen 
awning which shelters your face and eyes from the 
blinding rays of the sun, of strips of life and move- 

L 



146 UNDER THE SUN 

ment — foot-passengers, or riders in other volantes. 
To keep a gig was declared on a certain well-known 
occasion to be an undeniable proof of respectability. 
But, to ride in a gig drawn by a horse with a plaited 
tail and silver harness, and conducted by a postillion 
in a many-coloured jerkin and jack-boots, I consider 
to be the pinnacle of glory. 

It behoves me to offer two brief explanations with 
regard to the black postillions attire. When you 
come narrowly to inspect him, you discover that he 
is not entirely a man of truth. There is a spice of 
imposture about him. Those breeches and those 
boots are not wholly genuine. The first, you dis- 
cover, are mere linen drawers, instead of leathers ; 
indeed, to wear buckskins in the tropics would be a 
torture, the hint of whose possibility would have 
filled the hearts of the managing directors of the late 

© © 

Spanish Inquisition (unlimited) with gratitude. I 
could readilv forgive the negro for his trifling fraud 

j © © © 

as regards the leathers, the exigencies of climate 

© 7 © 

covering a multitude of sins ; but what shall we say 
of a postillion who pretends to wear jack-boots which 
turn out to be nothing but stiff leather gaiters or 
spatterdashes? These hypocritical boots are trun- 
cated close to the ankle, even as was that boot con- 
verted by Corporal Trim into a mortar for the siege 
of Dendermond. At the ankle these boots do not 
even diverge into decent bluchers or homely shoes. 
The bare feet of the black man are visible ; and on 
his bare heels and insteps are strapped the silver 



THE VOLANTE. 147 



spurs with their monstrous rowels. Now a jack-boot, 
I take it, is not a thing to be trifled with. It is 
either a boot or no boot. This volante appendage is 
a hybrid, and consequently abominable. The black 
postillion may urge, it is true, several pleas in abate- 
ment. First, nature has provided him with feet quite 
as black, as shiny, and as tough, as the extremities 
of any jack-boots that could be turned out by Mr. 
Hoby, Mr. Eunciman, or any other purveyor to her 
Majesty's Household Cavalry brigade. Next, the 
Moorish stirrups into which he thrusts his feet are not 
mere open arches of steel, but capacious foot-cases — 
overshoes hung by straps to the saddle. Finally, 
negroes are said to suffer more than white people 
from the insidious attacks of a very noxious insect 
common in Havana — a vile little wretch who marries 
early, and digs a hole in the ball of your toe, in which 
he and his wife reside. Mrs. Insect lays I know not 
how many thousand eggs in the hole under your skin, 
and inflammation, ulceration, and all the other ations 
— even sometimes to mortification, the last ation of all 
— ensue. Pending the advent of a nice fleshy great 
toe, in which they can construct a habitation, the 
young couple dwell, after the manner of the little 
foxes, in any holes and corners that offer; and the 
toe of a jack-boot would present a very comfortable 
lodging until they moved. So the negro postillion 
sensibly cuts off the foot of his boot, and his enemy 
cannot lie perdu, awaiting him in a leathern cavern. 
For this queer vehicle, the volante, I conceived a 



148 UNDER THE SUN 

violent longing ; and one of these days I mean to have 
a specimen curricle neatly packed in haybands and 
brought to Southampton per West India mail steamer. 
A black postillion I might obtain through the friendly 
offices of the Freedman's Aid Society, and for money 
you can have silver- adorned harness made to any 
pattern in Long-acre. I am not quite certain whether 
the metropolitan police would thoroughly appreciate 
the inordinate length of the volante shafts, although 
in the case of a block in Cheapside the space interven- 
ing between the horse and the gig body would give 
impatient foot-passengers an opportunity to duck 
under and cross the street comfortably; and I don't 
know whether I should get into trouble with the So- 
ciety for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, if I 
plaited my horse's tail up tight, and tied it to the 
saddle-bow, when summer heats were rife and flies 
were plentiful. 

The volante ! It is such a pretty name, too ; and, 
Shakespeare's doubt notwithstanding, there is much 
in a name. Southey and Coleridge and Wordsworth 
were bent on establishing their Pantisocracy on the 
banks of the Susquehanna — not because they knew 
anything of the locality, but because Susquehanna 
was such a pretty name. It is a very ugly river, 
and, curiously enough, it is the home of a bird pos- 
sessing at once the most delicious flavour and the 
most grotesque name imaginable — the canvas-back 
duck. 

The Cubans have a genuine passion for the vo- 



THE VOLANTE. 149 



lante. Volantes are the common hack cabs of Ha- 
vana; but then the horse is often but a sorry jade, 
and the negro postillion a ragged profligate 'cuss,' 
the state of whose apparel would have shocked Miss 
Tabitha Bramble, had she travelled so far as the An- 
tilles. But the private volantes as far exceed the 
public ones in number as they do in splendour. 
Everybody who can afford it keeps a volante, and 
many who cannot afford it keep a volante. It is the 
one luxury, the one expense, which, next to a cigar 
and a bull-fight, is dearest to the Spanish Creole 
heart, and which, by fair means or foul, must be pro- 
cured. I believe that the middle-class Cubans would 
sooner live on beans and cold water, dress in rags, 
and lie on straw like Margery Daw, than go without 
a volante. Fortunately, Providence has been very 
good to them. Their beautiful island runs over with 
fertility. All the world are eager to buy what they 
have to sell, and what almost exclusively they pro- 
duce — sugar and tobacco. So they make huge piles 
of dollars and gold ounces, and are enabled not only 
to keep volantes in profusion, but to give capital din- 
ners, and treat strangers with a generous hospitality 
very rarely shown in starched and stuck-up Europe. 

We have all heard of the fondness which the Be- 
douin Arabs show for their horses. We know that 
the Prophet Mahomet has written whole chapters of 
the Koran on the breeding and rearing of colts. We 
know that the young Arab foal is brought up in the 
tent with the little girls and boys, and that when he 



150 UNDER THE SUN 



grows up to be a horse he is petted and caressed. 
The children hang about his neck and call him en- 
dearing names ; the Arab mother strokes his nose and 
pats his cheek, fetches him sweet herbs, makes his 
bed, feeds him with bread and dates, and strips of 
meat cured in the sun. Well, the affection which 
the Arabs manifest for their horses the Cubans mani- 
fest for their volantes. They can scarcely endure 
that the beloved object should be out of their sight. 
Make an evening call — all fashionable calls in Cuba 
are made in the evening — and in a dim corner of the 
reception-parlour you will probably see a great pyra- 
mid covered up with brown holland. It is not a 
harp, it is not a grand pianoforte ; it is a volante. I 
must hint that Cuban reception rooms are immensely 
large and lofty, and are always on the ground floor; 
otherwise I might be supposed to be availing myself 
too extensively of the traveller's privilege, in relating 
that the drawing-room of a Cuban lady is not unfre- 
quently a coach-house as well. 



A HAED KOAD TO TRAVEL. 

It was part of the ineffable system of sweetness 
and light known as the wisdom of onr ancestors, to 
whip all the children on the morning of Innocents' 
Day, c in order that the memorial of Herod's murder 
might stick the closer.' The wisdom of our contem- 
poraries, while it has discarded the brutal practice of 
annually reacting the Massacre of the Innocents on a 
secondary scale, still retains a trace of the disagree- 
able mediaeval custom, in respect of 'the strict con- 
nection maintained in many households between 
Biblical study and afflictive punishment, and the 
intimate alliance between chapters from Jeremiah 
to be gotten by heart, and bread and water and 
dark cupboards. Who the philanthropic discoverer 
of child torture as a prelude to a church festival may 
have been, is uncertain; perhaps he was a near re- 
lative of the bright spirit who hit on the ingenious 
devices — to which the puddling of iron and the glaz- 
ing of pottery are but trifling puerilities — of con- 
fining black beetles in walnut shells and binding 
them over the eyes of infants ; or of that ardent 
lover of his species — connected with the educational 
profession — whose researches into the phenomena of 



152 UNDER THE SUN. 

physical pain led him to the inestimable discovery 
that by boring a hole, or any number of holes, in a 
piece of wood with which a child's hand is struck, a 
corresponding number of blisters may be raised on 
the smitten palm. 

Our good ancestors — can we ever be sufficiently 
grateful for the rack, or for the whirligig chair 
framed by medical wisdom for the treatment of acute 
mania! — blended the Innocents' Day custom with 
many of the observances of social life. ■ If they were 
wicked, these ancestors of ours, they were at least 
waggish in their wickedness. If the boundaries of a 
parish or the limits of an estate needed accurate 
record, they laid down a boy on the ascertained 
frontiers, and flogged him so soundly that he never 
forgot where the parish of St. Verges ended, or 
where that of St. Brooms began. Fifty years after- 
wards, if he were summoned as a witness at Nisi 
Prius, he would relate, quickened by the memory of 
his stripes, every topographical condition of the limits 
under discussion. The phantom of this sportive 
mode of combining cruelty with land-surveying yet 
survives in the annual outings of charity children 
to 'beat the bounds.' Formerly the charity boys, 
and not the bounds, were beaten; but now even the 
long willow wands with which bricks and mortar are 
castigated are falling into desuetude, and although 
the ceremony is still kept up in some parishes — the 
rector in his black gown and a chimney-pot hat, and 
bearing a large nosegay in his hand, being a sight to 



A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL. 153 

see — it is feared that beating the bounds will, in a 
few years, be wholly abolished, owing to the gradual 
but sure extinction of Beadles, as a race. Another 
vestige of what may be called Innocenticism lingered 
until recently in certain pleasant municipal excur- 
sions termed ' swanhoppings,' when some corpulent 
gentlemen, with a considerable quantity of lobster 
salad and champagne beneath their waistcoats, were 
sportively seized upon by the watermen of the Lord 
Mayor's barge, and 'bumped' on posts or rounded 
blocks of stone. The solemn usage had some refer- 
ence, it is to be presumed, to the liberties of the 
City, as guaranteed by the charter given by William 
the King to William the bishop, and Godfrey the 
portreeve. Or it might obscurely have related to 
the Conservancy of the Thames. Substantially, it 
meant half-a-crown to the Lord Mayor's watermen. 

In the south of France, there may be found 
growing, all the year round, as fine a crop of ignor- 
ance and fanaticism as the sturdiest Conservative 
might wish to look upon. The populace of Toulouse 
would hang the whole Calas family again to-morrow 
if they had a chance. The present writer was all 
but stoned once at Toulon for not going down on 
his knees in the street, in honour of the passage of 
an absurd little joss, preceded by a brass band, a 
drum-major, a battalion of the line, and a whole 
legion of priests. The country people still thrash 
their children mercilessly whenever a gang of con- 
victs go by on their way to the bagne, and especially 



154 UNDER THE SUN 

on the morning of the execution of a criminal. And 
it is a consolation to arrive at the conclusion, from 
patent and visible facts, that wherever wisdom, in its 
Ancestral form, triumphantly flourishes, there dirt, 
sloth, ignorance, superstition, fever, pestilence, and 
recurring famines, do most strongly flourish too. 

It may seem strange to the reader that, after 
venturing upon these uncomplimentary comments on 
our forefathers' sagacity, the writer should candidly 
proceed to own his belief that the human memory 
may be materially strengthened as to facts and dates, 
by the impressions of bodily anguish suffered con- 
currently with a particular day, or a particular event. 
Such, however, is the fact, although of course it can- 
not be accepted as a plea in extenuation of the most 
barbarous cruelty. For example, if the next time a 
tramp sought hospitality at the Guildford union, the 
guardians forthwith seized upon such tramp, and 
caused him to be branded with a hot iron from head 
to foot, and in Roman capitals, with the words, 'The 
guardians of the Guildford union refuse to relieve 
the Casual Poor,' the stigmatised vagrant would, to 
the day of his death, remember that Guildford union 
workhouse was not a place whereat bed and break- 
fast should be asked for. Still there is no combating 
the fact that the remembrances of agony are lasting. 
I have a very indistinct recollection of things which 
took place twenty, or even ten years ago; and I 
often ask myself with amazement whether it is possi- 
ble that I could ever have written such and such a 



A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL. 155 

letter, or known such a man or woman. Yet with 
microscopic minuteness, I can recall a yellow hackney- 
coach — the driver had a carbuncle on the left side of 
his nose — which, once upon a time, conveyed my 
nurse and myself to the residence of a fashionable 
dentist in Old Cavendish-street, London. I can re- 
member the black footman who opened the door, and 
the fiendish manner in which he grinned, as though 
to show that his molars needed no dentistry. I can 
remember the dog's-eared copy of the Belle-Assemblee 
on the waiting-room table; the widow lady with her 
face tied up, moaning by the window; the choleric 
old gentleman in nankeen trousers who swore ter- 
rifically because he was kept waiting; the frayed and 
threadbare edges of the green baize door leading to 
the dentist's torture chamber; the strong smell of 
cloves and spirits of wine and warm wax, about ; the 
dentist himself — his white neckcloth and shining 
bald head ; his horrible apparatus ; his more horrible 
morocco- covered chair; the drip, drip of water at 
the washstand ; the sympathising looks of my nurse ; 
the deadly dew of terror that started from my pores 
as the Monster seized me; and finally, that one ap- 
palling circular wrench, as though some huge bear 
with red hot jaws — he has favoured us all, in dreams 
— were biting my head off, and found my cervical 
vertebras troublesome: all these come back to me, 
palpably. Yet I had that tooth out eight-and-thirty 
years ago. 

A hard road to travel ! I should have forgotten 



156 UNDER THE SUN 

all about that road by this time but for the intoler- 
able pain I endured when I was travelling upon it. 
I have crossed Mont Cenis a dozen times, yet I 
should be puzzled to point out the principal portions 
of the landscape to a stranger. I could not repeat, 
without book, the names of the Rhine castles between 
Cologne and Mayence. I am sure I don't know how 
many stations there are between London and Brigh- 
ton. And I am not by any means 'letter' or 'figure 
perfect' in the multiplication table, although the road 
up to nine times eight was in my time about as hard 
travelling as could be gone through by a boy with a 
skin not quite so thick as that of a rhinoceros. But 
every inch of the hard road I happened to travel in 
the spring of 1864 — a road which stretches for some 
three hundred miles from the city of Yera Cruz to 
the city of Mexico — is indelibly impressed on my 
memory. Since then I have journeyed many thou- 
sands of miles over roads of more or less duresse ; 
and in the Tyrol, in Venetia, in Spain, in Algeria, 
I have often tested by sudden inward query the 
tenacity remaining in the reminiscence of that road 
in Mexico. You turn to the right from the great 
quay of Vera Cruz, passing the castle of San Juan 
de Ulloa. You drive to a wretched railway station, 
and take the train (I am speaking of 1864) to a 
place called La Soledad, some five-and-twenty miles 
inland. There you sleep. Next morning at day- 
break you start in a carriage along the great Spanish 
highway, and by nightfall make Cordova. At four on 



A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL. 157 

the following morning you drive to Orizaba — you are 
taking things quietly, mind, in consequence of the 
road — and pass the day there. Again on the morrow 
you start at four a.m. from Cordova for Sant' Augus- 
tin del Palmar, where you dine and sleep. The next 
day's journey brings you, by sunset, to Puebla. The 
next day you make Rio Frio, in time for breakfast, and 
at about iive in the afternoon you pass the Garita, or 
customs-barrier, and are in the city of Montezuma, the 
capital of Mexico. That is the road. I spent, going 
up, six days on the journey ; but I was an inmate of 
a private carriage. I came down again in a public 
diligence, in three days; but, for reasons I shall 
explain afterwards, the agony of the private travel- 
ling carriage far surpassed that of the stage-coach. 

Ostensibly I had no reason for grumbling. I was 
the guest of a kind friend whose carriage had been 
built in New York, with a special view to Mexican 
highways, and who, being a great friend and patron 
of the contractor for the Imperial Diligences — Mexico 
was an empire in '64 — was certain of relays of mules 
all the way from the sea-coast to the capital. We 
had a good store of wine with us, and plenty of 
Havana cigars ; and in the. way of edibles the com- 
missariat of Mexico is as abundant as that of Old 
Spain is meagre.* The route was singularly clear 

* It is curious that in countries where wine is plentiful there should 
be nothing procurable to eat, and that in non-wine-growing, but beer or 
cider-producing, countries the traveller should always be sure of a good 
dinner. Out of the beaten track in Italy, a tourist runs the risk of being 
half starved. In Spain, he is starved habitually and altogether ; but he 



158 UNDER THE SUN 

from highway robbers at that time; the French 
being in force at Cordova, Orizaba, and Puebla, and 
patrolling every league of the way, not only with 
their own dragoons, but with local levies known as 
contra-guerrilleros. Finally, we had taken the pre- 
caution of leaving behind us in safe care at Vera 
Cruz, our watches, gold ' onzas,' and other valuables, 
keeping only a few loose dollars for the expenses of 
the journey. I even left my clothes and servant on 
the coast, and during the six weeks I remained in 
Mexico city was not only boarded and lodged, but 
washed and clothed by my generous host: even to 
the articles of purple and fine linen, lapis-lazuli wrist- 
buttons, a Mexican hat as broad as a brougham wheel, 
and a pair of spurs with rowels as big as cheese- 
plates. So, if we had been robbed on the way, the 
guerillas would have found very little of which to 
plunder us. The pain, the misery, the wretchedness 
I endured, almost without intermission for six days 
— at night you generally dreamed of your bumps, 
and suffered all your distresses over again — were 
entirely due to the abominable road upon which we 
entered, for our sins, at La Soledad, and which we 
did not leave until we came to the very custom-house 



is sure of victuals in England, in America, and in Russia. Even in the 
East, fowls, eggs, kids, and rice are generally obtainable in the most 
out-of-the-way places ; but many a time have I been dismissed hungry 
jErom a village hostelry in France with the cutting remark : ' Monsieur, 
nous n'avons plus rien.' There is an exception to the rule in Germany 
— I except Prussia — which bounteous land runs over with wine, beer, 
beef, veal, black and white bread, potatoes, salad, and sauerkraut. 



A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL. 159 

barrier of Mexico. Sixteen years have passed since 
I travelled on the Czar's Highway and found it bad. 
I have waded through the Virginian mud since then; 
have made acquaintance with muleback on the banks 
of the Guadalquivir ; have tried a camel (for a very 
short time) at Oram But I can conscientiously 
declare that I never found so hard a road to travel 
as that road between Yera Cruz and Mexico, and 
I am confident that, were I to live to sixty years 
of age (the Mexican railway by that time being com- 
pleted and paying fifteen per cent on its stock, and 
a beautifully Macadamised carriage road running be- 
side it for three hundred miles) and I were questioned 
as to what the Mexican highway was like in 1864, I 
should, on the 'beating the bounds' principle, pre- 
serve as lively a remembrance of its horrors as I 
preserve of it now, a peaceable and contented daily 
traveller on the Queen's Highway and the Metro- 
politan Railway. 

Had I not been somewhat obtuse, I might have 
noticed on board the steamer which brought us from 
Havana, that my friend was nervous, even to un- 
easiness, as to the form my earliest impressions of 
Mexican travelling might assume. I must, expect to 
' rough it ' a little, he remarked. I answered that I 
had tried an American ambulance wagon, and a 
M'Clellan saddle, and that I could not imagine any- 
thing rougher than those aids to locomotion. ' Our 
Toads are not quite up to the mark of Piccadilly,' he 
would hint sometimes. ' You see, since the French 



160 UNDER THE SUN 

came to attack Juarez, everything has been knocked 
into a cocked hat.' However, he always wound up 
his warnings by declaring that we shouldn't find a 
single robber on the road, and that we should go up 
to Mexico, ' like a fiddle.' If the state in which I 
eventually reached Mexico bore any resemblance to 
the musical instrument in question, it must have 
been akin to that of the fiddle of the proprietor of 
the bear in Hadibras, warped and untuned, with my 
bow broken, a fracture in my stomach, another in 
my back, and my strings flying all abroad. 

I sincerely hope that I shall never see Vera Cruz 
again : — the ill-omened, sweltering, sandy, black, 
turkey -buzzard-haunted home of yellow fever ! I shall 
not forget, however, that I was hospitably entertained 
there, and especially I shall never lose consciousness 
of a long telescope in the saloon overlooking the 
roadstead, to which I am indebted for one of the 
drollest scenes I ever saw in my life. There were 
three or four French men-of-war stationed at Vera 
Cruz at the time, but they could not lie in the har- 
bour, which is not by any means landlocked, and has 
but an insufficient breakwater in the castle of San 
Juan de . Ulloa. The Spithead of Vera Cruz is off 
Sacrificios, a place which owes its name to the hor- 
rible human sacrifices perpetrated there up to the 
time of Cortes' invasion. Sunday being the French- 
man's day of joyous recreation all over the world, 
leave had been granted, with some liberality, to the 
crews of the war-ships in port; and from our window 



A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL. 161 

we had seen, during the morning and afternoon, 
numerous parties of gallant French Jack-tars — they 
are so picturesquely dandified in appearance, that 
they more closely resemble patent blacking than 
common tar — swaggering along the strand, peeping 
under the mantillas of the women, kissing their 
hands to tawny old Indian dames smoking their 
papelitos in shadowy doorways, and occasionally 
singing and skipping, through mere joyousness of 
heart and exuberance of spirits. Many of the men- 
o'-war's men were negroes from the Mauritius, and 
it was very pleasant to remark that their colour did 
not in the least interfere with their being hail-fellow- 
well-met with the white seamen. But you would 
very rarely see an American and a black foremast- 
man arm-in-arm. These fine fellows of the Imperial 
French navy had, I hope, attended service at the 
cathedral in the morning ; but, as day wore on, they 
had certainly patronised the aguardiente shops with 
great assiduity; and spirituous intoxication, follow- 
ing, perhaps, on a surfeit of melons, shaddocks, and 
pineapples, in a tropical climate, is not very good for 
the health. Touching at St. Thomas's once, I said 
inquiringly to the captain of the mail steamer, ' And 
this is the white man's grave, is it?' 4 No,' he ans- 
wered, c that is ;' and he pointed to a brandy-bottle 
on the cabin-table. 

I don't think I ever saw so many tipsy tars as I 
.did that Sunday at Vera Cruz. Portsmouth, with a 
squadron just in from a long cruise, was a temperance 

M 



162 UNDER THE SUN 

hotel compared with this tropical town. It is diffi- 
cult to repress a smile when one is told that French- 
men never get tipsy. All that I have seen of French 
soldiers and sailors on active service, leads me to the 
persuasion that they will drink as much as they can 
get; and in their cups they are inexpressibly mis- 
chievous, and not unfrequently very savage. Yet, 
although rowdy, insolent, and quarrelsome, they 
rarely fall to fisticuffs, as our men do.* On this 
particular Sunday they so frightened Vera Cruz 
from its propriety — the inhabitants being mainly an 
abstemious race, suffering from chronic lowness of 
spirits, in consequence of civil war and the yellow 
fever — that pickets of infantry were sent out from 
the main guard to pick up inebriated mariners and 
pack them off on board ship again. The French are 
very quick at adapting themselves to the usages of 
the country they visit, and, short as was the time 
they had been in Mexico, they had learnt the use of 
that wonderfully serviceable instrument, the lasso. 
The pickets, wearing only their side-arms, went 



* You will find, in Algeria, at the military penitentiaries, ' discipli- 
nary battalions,' formed almost entirely of incorrigible drunkards. The 
excesses committed by the French in Mexico, and which were generally 
induced by libations of aguardiente or commissariat brandy, were 
atrocious ; in fact, they bore out the reputation given them by the 
Duke of Wellington in his evidence before the Royal Commission on 
Military Punishments. See Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Mus- 
ketry, in Household Words, 1851. Five out of ten soldiers who massa- 
cred the citizens of Paris on the boulevards in the December of that 
year were drunk. — (P.S.) I wrote these remarks in 1866. Since then 
we have seen the war of 1870 and the insurrection of 1871, and a great 
deal more of what the c temperate' French can do in the way of tippling. 



A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL. 163 

about lassoing tipsy sailors right and left, most 
scientifically; and after they had caught their men 
in running nooses, they l coralled them' — that is to 
say, they would encircle a whole group of nautical 
bacchanalians with a thin cord, which, beino- tio-ht- 
ened, the whole body of revellers would be drawn 
close together. Then, the pickets would, with mild 
applications of their sheathed bayonets, astern, run 
the captives down to the waterside, and tumble them 
into the boats which were to convey them on board 
their respective ships. 

This afternoon's entertainment had continued for 
some time ; and the last boat-load of topers having 
been dispatched, Vera Cruz was once more left to 
the blazing sunshine, and to the black scavenger 
buzzards. My hosts were all in their hammocks 
(slung in the corridor), enjoying their siesta. I 
could not sleep, and bethought me of the long brass 
telescope on a tripod in the balcony. I got the 
lens adjusted to my sight at last, and made out 
the castle of San Juan ; the tricoloured flag idly 
drooping from the staff on the tower ; the shining 
black muzzles of the cannon, looking out of the 
embrasures of the bastions, like savage yet sleepy 
mastiffs blinking from their kennels; the sentinel, 
with a white turban round his shako, pacing up and 
down; the bright bayonet on his rifle throwing off 
sparkling rays. But beyond the castle, some two 
miles distant, there was nothing to see. Sacrificios 
and the squadron were 'round the corner,' so to 



1 64 UNDER THE SUN 

speak, and out of my field of view. The native craft 
were all moored in-shore; and Vera Cruz is not a 
place where you go out pleasure-boating. There 
was nothing visible beyond the arid, dusty foreshore, 
but the* excruciatingly bright blue sky and the in- 
tolerably bright blue sea: Jove raining down one 
canopy of molten gold over the whole, as though he 
thought that Danae was bathing somewhere in those 
waters. I fell a musing over poor Alexander Smith's 

' All dark and barren as a rainy sea.' 

The barrenness here was as intense; but it was 
from brightness. You looked upon a liquid desert 
of Sahara. Ah! what is that? A dark speck mid- 
way between the shore and the horizon. The tiniest 
imaginable speck. I shift the telescope, try again, 
and again focus my speck. It grows, it intensifies, 
it 25, with figures large as life, so it seems, finished 
with Dutch minuteness, full of colour, light, and 
shade, colour animation, a picture that gross Jan 
Steen, that Hogarth, that C allot, might have painted. 
A boat crammed full of tipsy sailors. There is one 
man who feels very unwell, and who, grasping his 
ribs with either hand, grimaces over the gunwale in 
a most pitiable manner. Another is argumentatively 
drunk, and is holding forth to a staid quartermaster, 
who is steering. Another is harmoniously intoxi- 
cated. Then there is a man who is in a lachrymose 
state of liquor, and is probably bewailing La Belle 
France and his Mother. Suddenly a negro, who is 



A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL. 165 

Mad Drunk, tries to jump overboard. Such a bustle, 
such a commotion ! They get the obstreperous black 
man down and lay him in the sheets, and he too 
begins to sing. It is as though you were a deaf 
man looking at the Apropos des buveurs,' in Rabelais. 
And in the midst of all this the boat with its stolid 
sober rowers goes pitching and bounding about the 
field of the telescope, sometimes swerving quite out 
of it, and leaving but a blank brightness ; then, com- 
ing into full focus again, in all its wondrous detail of 
Reality. 

After a night not entirely unembittered by the 
society of mosquitoes, we rose ; took the conventional 
cup of chocolate, crust of dry bread, and glass of 
cold water ; and, bidding farewell to our entertainers, 
drove to the railway terminus. I didn't expect much 
from a railway point of view, and consequently was 
not disappointed. We have all heard of things being 
rough and ready. There was plenty of roughness 
here, without the readiness. It was nearly noon, 
and the industrial staff of the station, represented by 
two Indians in striped blankets (serving them for 
coat, vest, and pantaloons), and monstrous straw 
hats, w^ere sleeping in two handbarrows. The sta- 
tion-master, a creole Spaniard, had slung his grass 
hammock in a shady nook behind the pay- place, and 
was sleeping the sleep of the just. There was a 
telegraph office, recently established by the French; 
and the operator, with his face resting on his arms, 
and those limbs resting on the bran-new mahogany 



1 66 UNDER THE SUN 

instrument from Paris, snored peacefully. It was 
the most primitive station imaginable. There was one 
passenger waiting for the train, a half-caste Mexican 
'greaser,' fast asleep at full length on the floor, and 
with his face prone to it. He had a bag of Indian 
corn with him, on which, for safety, he lay; and he 
had brought a great demi-pique saddle too, which 
rested on his body, the stirrup leathers knotted to- 
gether over the pummel, and which looked like a 
bridge over the river Lethe. Where was his horse? 
I wondered. Did he own one, or had his gallant 
steed been shot under him in battle, and was he on 
his way to steal another? Altogether, this rickety 
ruinous railway station, with the cacti growing close 
to the platform, and with creepers twining about 
every post and rafter, and bits of brick, and stray 
scaffold-poles, and fragments of matting, and useless 
potsherds, and coils of grass rope littered about in 
the noontide glare, reminded me with equal force 
of an Aztec building speculation overtaken by bank- 
ruptcy, and of a tropical farmyard in which all the 
live stock had died of yellow fever. 

The time for the train to start had long expired ; 
but there was no hurry ; so my travelling companion 
lay down with his head on the half-caste's saddle and 
took a little nap. I wandered on to the platform, 
and there, to my pleasurable surprise, found one man 
who was v awake. Who but a French gendarme ? 
One of a picked detachment of that admirable force 
sent out to Mexico to keep both invaders and in- 



A HARD ROAD TO TRA VEL. 167 

vaded in order — combed, brushed, polished, waxed, 
pomatumed, booted, spurred, sabred, belted, cocked- 
hatted, gauntleted, medalled — a complete and per- 
fect gendarme. He was affable, sententious, and 
dogmatic. ' Mexico/ he observed, c was a country 
without hope.' I have since inclined to the belief 
that the gendarme did not dogmatise quite unreason- 
ably on this particular head. He farther remarked 
that discipline must be maintained, and that in view 
of that necessity he had usually administered 'une 
fameuse volee,' in the shape of blows with the flat of 
his sword, to the station-master. He accepted a 
cigar, to be reserved for the time of his relief from 
duty; and not to be behindhand in politeness, he 
favoured me with a pinch of snuff from a box bear- 
ing on the lid the enamelled representation of a 
young lady, in her shirt-sleeves and a pair of black- 
velvet trousers, dancing a jig of a carnavalesque kind. 
' I adore the theatre,' said the gendarme. ' Monsieur 
has no doubt seen La Belle Helene in Paris?' I 
replied that I had witnessed the performance of that 
famous extravaganza. ' Ah !' continued the gen- 
darme, with something like a sigh. ' They essayed 
it at Mauritius; but it obtained only a success of 
esteem. Monsieur may figure to himself the effect 
of a Belle Helene who was a mulatto. As for " Aga- 
memnon," he did not advance at all. J'aurais bien 
flanque trois jours de saile de police a ce gredin la? 
I intend, Monsieur,' he concluded, 'to visit the 
Bouffes, and to assist at a representation of the 



1 68 UNDER THE SUN . 

work of M. Jacques Offenbach, when I reimpatriate 
myself and enter the civil. 5 Honest gendarme! I 
hope the Vomito spared him, and that he has r ex- 
patriated himself by this time, and seen not only 
La Belle Helene, but Orphee aux Enfers and La Grande 
Duchesse de Gerolstein. 

The station-master woke up about one o'clock, 
and it appeared that he had sent a messenger down 
into the town to ask my friend at what time he 
would like to have the train ready. There was 
no other passenger save the half-caste, who would 
very cheerfully have waited until the day after next, 
or the week after next, or the Greek Kalends. My 
friend said he thought we might as well start at 
once ; so half a dozen Indians were summoned from 
outhouses where they had been dozing, and we pro- 
ceeded to a shed, and picked out the most comfortable 
carriage in the rolling stock, which was but limited. 
We found a t car' at last, of the American pattern, 
open at either end, but with cane -bottomed instead 
of stuffed seats, and Venetian blinds to the windows. 
The engine, also, presently came up puffing and 
sweating to remind us of a fact which had, at least, 
slipped my memory — that we were living in the 
nineteenth and not in the ninth century ; — a locomo- 
tive of the approved American model; blunderbuss 
funnel; 'cow-catcher' in front; penthouse in rear 
for the driver; warning bell over the boiler, and 
4 Asa Hodge and Co., Pittsburg, Pa.' embossed on a 
plate on the ' bogey' frame. Everything in this 



A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL. 169 

country which in mechanical appliances can remind 
you of civilisation, comes from the United States. 
New York is to Mexico as Paris is to Madrid. 

The machine had an Indian stoker, and uncom- 
monly like a gnome, or a kobold, or some other 
variety of the demon kind did that Indian look, with 
his coppery skin powdered black with charcoal dust, 
and his grimy blanket girt around him with a frag- 
ment of grass-rope. But the engine-driver was a 
genuine Yankee — in a striped jacket and a well-worn 
black-satin vest — a self-contained man, gaunt, spare, 
mahogany-visaged, calm, collected, and expectoratory, 
with that wonderful roving Down-East eye, which 
always seems to be looking out for something to 
patent, and make two hundred and fifty thousand 
dollars by. But for the Mexican sombrero which he 
had donned, and the revolver which he wore conspi- 
cuously in his belt, you might have taken him for a 
law-abiding manufacturer of patent clothes-wringers 
or mowing-machines, from Hartford or Salem. He 
' passed the time of day' to us very civilly, and con- 
firmed the good news that there were no guerrilleros 
on the road. c The French have fixed up a whole 
crowd of 'em about Puebla,' he said, ' and they don't 
care .about being hung up by the score, like hams 
round a stove pipe. I ain't been shot at for a month, 
and I've loaned my Sharp's rifle to a man that's gone 
gunning down to the Cameroons.' 

The long car we had selected was attached to the 
locomotive, and a luggage van coupled to that, in 



17 o UNDER THE SUN 



which a fatigue party of French soldiers who had 
just marched into the station placed a quantity of 
commissariat stores for the detachment on duty at 
La Soleclad. We got under weigh, but, the line 
being single, were temporarily shunted on to a sid- 
ing : the telegraph having announced the coming in 
of a train from the interior. 

A few minutes afterwards there rumbled into the 
station a long string of cars, which disgorging their 
contents, the platform became thronged with, at least, 
five hundred men; stranger arrivals by an excursion 
train I never saw. The strangers were mostly tall 
athletic fellows, clean limbed, and with torsos like to 
that of the Farnese Hercules. Noble specimens of 
humanity : and every man of them as black as the 
Ace of Spades. They were in slave-dealers' parlance 
— -now, happily a dead language — 'full-grown buck- 
niggers.' They were uniformly clad, in loose jerkins, 
vests, and knickerbockers of spotless white linen; and 
their ebony heads — many of them very noble and 
commanding in expression, straight noses and well- 
chiselled lips being far from uncommon — were bound 
with snowy muslin turbans. These five hundred 
men, shod with sandals of untanned hide, armed 
with musket and bayonet, and the short heavy Roman 
' tuck' or stabbing sword, and carrying their cartouch- 
boxes in front of them, formed a battalion of that 
noted Nubian contingent, of whom there were three 
regiments altogether, hired from the Viceroy of Egypt 
by the French government for service in Mexico. 



A HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL. 171 

They had come down from La Soledad to reinforce 
the wasting garrison of Vera Cruz, of which the 
European portion were dying of Vomito like sheep 
of the rot. The sergeants and corporals were black ; 
but the commissioned officers were Egyptian Arabs, 
sallow, weazened, undersized creatures in braided 
surtouts of blue camlet, and red fez caps. They 
compared very disadvantageously with the athletic 
and symmetrically-built negroes. 

These Nubians, my friend the gendarme told me, 
were good soldiers, so far as fighting went, but irre- 
claimable scoundrels. They were horribly savage, 
and jabbered some corrupted dialect with Arabic 
for its base, but Mumbo Jumbo for its branches, and 
which their own officers could scarcely understand. 
The system by which discipline was preserved among 
them had been beautifully simplified. If a Nubian 
soldier didn't do what he was told, his officer, for the 
first offence, fell to kicking him violently. If he 
persisted in his disobedience, the officer drew his 
sabre, and cut him down. 

Think of a Mahometan Khedive letting out his two 
thousand Pagan negroes to a Roman Catholic emperor, 
in order that he might coerce the Spanish and Red 
Indian population of an American republic into re- 
cognising the supremacy of an Austrian archduke! 
As the Enemy of Mankind is said to have remarked 
on a memorable occasion, 'It's a queer lot, and the 
cards want sorting.' 



THE DIVERSIONS OF LA SOLEDAD. 

The Imperial Mexican railway, in the year 1864, was 
in its infancy. The entire line of route had been 
carefully surveyed, and beautifully mapped out ; all 
engineering difficulties had been disposed of, on 
paper, and vast numbers of labourers were employed 
on cuttings and embankments ; but nine-tenths of the 
line yet remained to be made. A considerable im- 
petus had been given to all kinds of industry in the 
normally distracted country just then. The unfor- 
tunate Maximilian had accepted the crown from the 
commission of Mexican ' notables 7 who waited on 
him at Miramar ; and General Almonte had been 
appointed president of a Council of Regency until 
' El Principe,' as the emperor elect was called, should 
arrive. As for Don Benito Juarez, he was nobody, 
and, in sporting parlance, might be said to be 'no- 
where.' He was supposed to be hiding his dimin- 
ished head in the neighbourhood of Brownsville, on 
the frontier of Texas, and I have heard him spoken 
of innumerable times by Mexican politicians (who 
are, I daresay, very ardent Juarists by this time), 
in the most contemptuous terms. The mildest epi- 



THE DIVERSIONS OF LA SO LED AD. 173 

thet with which he was qualified was ' El Indio,' the 
Indian : President Juarez having scarcely any Euro- 
pean blood in his veins. More frequently he was 
called 'the bandit/ or the 'banished despot.' 

So everything looked very bright and hopeful in 
Mexico ; a strong French force occupying the coun- 
try; and the railway (which was already open for 
traffic as far as La Soledad) was being pushed for- 
ward towards Paso del Macho. We jogged along 
pretty steadily in our omnibus car; but, until we 
reached a place called Manga de Clavo, I thought 
that Mexico must be the counterpart of the Egyptian 
desert. For miles the line was skirted by sandhills. 
There were more sandhills in the middle distance, 
and the extreme horizon was bounded by sandhills ; 
the whole of which, illumined by a persistently fero- 
cious sunshine, offered the reverse of an encouraging 
prospect. Luckily there was no sirocco, or the sand 
would have invaded the carriage and choked us. 

But with magical rapidity the scene changed, and 
the desert bloomed into fruitfulhess amazing. The 
train plunged into a densely wooded country. We 
saw thick clumps of trees spangled with blossoms or 
bending under the load of bright - hued tropical 
fruits ; the foreground was literally one parterre of 
variegated flowers, and the 'cow-catcher' of the 
engine scattered roses as we marched. I began to 
warm into enthusiasm. We hurried by palm trees, 
cocoa-nut trees, lemon and orange groves, and forests 
of the banana. That tree with its broad blood- 



174 UNDER THE SUN. 

stained leaves, and its body reft and bent by the last 
hurricane and the last rainstorm, swaying and bulg- 
ing, but abating not one jot of its ruby ruddiness, 
should furnish a potent liquor ; but the fruit of the 
banana is in reality very mild and suave ; conveying 
to the mind, in its dulcet mawkishness, the idea of 
sweet shaving paste. It is most tolerable when fried, 
and served as a savoury dish. And here I may re- 
mark that the majority of tropical fruits are pro- 
ductive of most grievous disappointment when eaten. 
From the shaddock downward, I don't think I met 
any which caused me to think disparagingly of the 
central avenue at Govent Garden in London, or of 
the Marche St. Honore in Paris. Abnormal size is 
the principal characteristic of tropical fruits. They 
are intensely sweet ; but the saccharine matter has 
an ugly propensity to turn acid on the stomach and 
kill you. The flavour is generally flaccid and in- 
sipid. From this general censure must be always 
excepted the sweet lemon — not the lime — a most ex- 
quisitely toothsome fruit. 

Ever and anon, in the density of this new and 
delicious landscape, there would occur an opening 
revealing a little valley vividly green, studded with 
flowers, and perchance with a few scattered wigwams 
built of palm branches and thatched with palm 
leaves. The Indian women in their simple costume 
— almost invariably consisting of two articles, a che- 
mise of coarse white cotton cloth called 'manta' and 
a, narrow petticoat-skirt of red and black, or black 



THE DIVERSIONS OF LA SO LED AD. 175 

and yellow striped stuff — looked, at a distance, pic- 
turesque enough. Round about all the palm-branch 
wigwams there were seen to be sprawling groups of 
Indian ' papooses' or babies of the precise hue of roast 
fowls well done. Their costume was even more simple 
than that of their mammas. Mexican scenery, save 
where the massive mountain passes intervene, is one 
continuous alternation. Xow comes a belt so many 
miles broad of wonderful fertility. Indian corn — 
the stalks as tall as beadles' staves, the cobs as large 
as cricket bats — oranges, lemons, bananas, sugar, 
coffee, cotton, rice, cinnamon, nutmegs, and all man- 
ner of spices. Then, for many more miles, you have 
a belt of absolute barrenness, a mere sandy desert. 
What I saw of Mexico reminded me of a tiger's skin 
— dull yellow desert barred with rich dark brown 
stripes of fertility. The land is like a Sahara diver- 
sified by slices from the valley of Kashmir. 

The sun was throwing very long blue shadows 
indeed from the objects which skirted our track, 
when Ave brought up at the straggling structure of 
deal boards, palm branches, and galvanised tinned 
iron, or zinc sheds, which did duty as the railway 
terminus of La Soledad. We found a number of 
very hospitable gentlemen waiting to receive us ; the 
sleepy telegraphic operator at Vera Cruz having 
apparently made himself sufficiently wide awake to 
notify our coming. He had done us good service. 
A cordial welcome and a good dinner awaited us. 
Our hosts were the engineers and surveyors engaged 



176 UNDER THE SUN. 

on the works of the railway ; and the Engineer is 
always well off for commissariat supplies. He is the 
only foreigner, the only invader, on whom the rudest 
and most superstitious races look without disfavour ; 
for, from the lord of the neighbouring manor, to the 
parish priest — nay, to the meanest day labourer — 
everybody has a dim impression that the bridge, or 
the aqueduct, or the railway, will do the country 
good, and that every inhabitant of the district will, 
sooner or later, ' get something out of it.' 

Our friends of La Soledad were accomplished 
gentlemen, full of the traditions of Great George- 
street, Westminster ; pioneers from the Far West ; 
rough Lancashire gangers and hard-handed Cornish- 
men. They were banded together, by the responsi- 
bilities of a common undertaking, and by the con- 
sciousness of a common danger; for, until within the 
last few weeks, every man had worked with his life 
in his hand. The station of La Soledad had been 
attacked by banditti, over and over again ; and it had 
been a common practice with the guerrilleros to lie 
in wait in the jungle, and 'pot' the passengers in 
passing trains. Even now, the little group were 
lamenting the loss of their managing engineer, who 
had been shot while riding along an unfinished por- 
tion of the line. ' The colonel lasted six days after 
they'd hit him,' an American overseer of workmen 
told me ; l and it was a desperate cruel thing, seeing 
that he left a wife and three small children : but he'd 
had a good time, I guess, the colonel had. "Brown," 



THE DIVERSIONS OF LA SO LED AD. 177 

he ses, turning to me, and clasping my hand as he 
lay on the mattress in that hut over yonder, "they've 
done for me at last ; but I reckon I've shot eight of 
'em since last fall." And so he had.' 

There were two other points in which our rail- 
way friends were cheerfully unanimous. They all 
concurred in despising the Mexicans, and disliking 
the French. 'As for the half-castes and Spaniards,' 
the American overseer remarked, 'they're right down 
scallywaggs. Hanging's too good for 'em ; and the 
only thing that makes me bear the French is, that 
when they catch a Mexican guerrillero, they cowhide 
him first, and shoot him afterwards, and hang him 
up as a climax. As for the Injuns, they're poor 
weak-kneed creatures ; but there's no harm in 'em. 
About a hundred will do the work of ten stout 
Irishmen. I used to try licking of 'em at first, to 
make 'em spry ; but, bless you ! they don't mind 
licking. They just lie down on the turf like mules. 
Well I recollected how the mayoral of a diligencia 
makes his team to go when they're stubborn ; he 
just gets down and walks behind, and he fills his 
pocket with sharp little stones, and every now and 
then he shies a stone which hits a mule behind the 
ear, and he cries c Ha-i-a-youp !' and the mule he 
shakes his head, and gallops along full split. When 
I see my Indian peons shirking their work, I just sit 
on a stone about fifty yards off, and every minute or 
so I let one of 'em have a pebble underneath the left 
ear. The crittur wriggles like an eel in a pump-log, 

N 



178 UNDER THE SUN. 

and falls a working as though he was going to build 
Babel before sundown.' 

Why the French should have been so intensely 
disliked I could not rightly determine. That the 
Mexicans should have hated them was feasible 
enough ; but I rarely found an Englishman or a 
German in Mexico who would give the army of 
occupation a good word. I have frequently ex- 
pressed my opinion that a Frenchman in a black 
coat, in light pantaloons, in straw-coloured kid 
gloves, in a blouse and sabots, even, is a most agree- 
able, friendly, light-hearted creature ; but make his 
acquaintance when he is on active service, in a kepi 
and scarlet pantaloons, and I fear you will find that 
a more arrogant and a more rapacious swashbuckler 
does not exist. That is the character, at least, which 
the French warrior has gotten in Mexico, in Algeria, 
in Germany, in Italy — his transient spell of popu- 
larity in '59 excepted — and in Spain. 

I remember that the ragged assemblage of maize, 
and palm-straw, and mud, and wattle huts, which 
forms the town of La Soledad, lay in the midst of a 
broad valley, the sides shelving to a rocky base, 
through which ran a shallow river. I came to this 
place on the last day of February. There had been 
heavy rains a few days previously, and there was 
some water, but not much, in the bed of the river. 
In the summer the rivers of Mexico are as dry as 
the Paglione at Nice ; and the bridges seems as use- 
less as spurs to the military gentlemen in garrison at 



THE DIVERSIONS OF LA SOLED AD. 179 

1 

Venice. There was a detachment of French infantry 
at La Soledad, whose cheerful bugles were summon- 
ing the wearers of about two hundred pairs of red 
trousers to the evening repast, of which i ratatouille/ 
a kind of gipsy stew, forms the staple ingredient. 
This evening meal is called the ' ordinaire,' and is made 
up of the leavings of the day's rations, and of such 
odds and ends of victual as the soldiers have man- 
aged to purchase or forage. There is no such even- 
ing entertainment in the British army. Our men 
eat their clumsily cooked rations in a hurry, and 
often pass long hours of hunger between their ill- 
arranged meals. The bugle- calls of the French 

© © 

brought from the shingly shores of the river numbers 
of moustached warriors who had been washing their 
shirts and gaiters — socks were not worn by the army 
of occupation — in the stream. It was very pretty to 
watch the red-legged figures winding along the paths 
running upward through the valley, with boards 
laden with white linen on their heads. There was 
a grand background to the picture in a mountain 
range, rising tier above tier : . not in blue delicate 
peaks and crags, as in the Alps, but in solid, sullen, 
dun-coloured masses. I can recall one now, with 
ribbed flanks, and a great shelving head, that looked 
like an old brown lion couchant. 

The railway gentlemen resided at a little canton- 
ment of timber and corrugated zinc huts, the last of 
which, although weather-tight, and agreeably repellent 
of various insects (which swarm in wooden structures), 



180 UNDER THE SUN 

were, when the sun shone, intolerably hot. As the 
sun so shone habitually, without mercy, from eight in 
the morning until six in the evening, the corrugated 
zinc huts became by sunset so many compact ovens, 
suited either to baking, broiling, or stewing the in- 
mates. However, life in Mexico amounts, in the long 
run, only to a highly varied choice of evils ; and de- 
vouring insects being somewhat more aggravating 
than a warm room, the engineers had chosen that evil 
which they deemed the lesser. I suffered so terribly, 
however, during my sojourn in this highly rarified 
country, from determination of blood to the head, 
hat I entreated my hosts to be allowed to sleep under 
a palm thatch in lieu of corrugated zinc. My wish was 
acceded to — to my partial destruction. 

We dined sumptuously on hot stews, made much 
hotter with chiles and ■ peperos,' the effect of which 
last condiment on the palate I can only compare to 
that of a small shrapnel shell going off in your mouth. 
We had plenty of sound claret, and, if I remember 
right, a flask or so of that white-seal champagne which 
at transatlantic tables is considered to be many degrees 
preferable to Veuve Clicquot. A bottle of 'Sunny- 
side' Madeira, warranted from a Charleston ' garret,' 
was also produced. We were too recently from Ha- 
vana to be unprovided with Sefior Anselmo del Valle's 
fragrant merchandise; and let me whisper to the 
wanderer, that he who spares no efforts to be provided 
with good cigars in his baggage, will be at least en- 
abled to make some slight return for the hospitality 



THE DIVERSIONS OF LA SOLEDAD. 181 

he will receive. For, in these far- distant cantonments, 
the stock of cigars is liable to run out, and can with 
difficulty be renewed. 

After dinner we talked Mexican politics — a con- 
versation which generally resolved itself into three 
conclusions. First, that when things come to the 
worst they may mend. Second, that things had come 
to the worst in Mexico. Third, that Maximilian and 
his empire might last as long as the French occupation 
continued, and as long as his own stock of gold ounces 
and hard dollars held out. I can aver that on this last 
head I never heard any more sanguine opinion ex- 
pressed during the whole time I was in Mexico. Then 
we played a hand at poker, and tried a rubber at 
whist, then songs were sung, and then we went out 
for a walk. The French tattoo had sounded, and most 
of the moustached warriors had retired to their huts ; 
but there were strong pickets patrolling the streets, 
and double guards posted at every gate. When I 
speak of the ' gates' of this place, I allude simply to 
certain booms or logs of timber placed athwart blocks 
of stone at intervals, and by the side of each of 
which was a French guard hut. When I allude to 
La Soledad's ' streets,' I mean simply that the palm- 
branch and mud-and-wattle huts of the Indian and 
half-caste population had been erected in two parallel 
lines, with a few alleys of smaller hovels, with suc- 
cursals of dunghills branching from them. Once upon 
a time, I believe La Soledad had possessed a 'plaza,' 
several stone houses, and two churches ; but all that 



182 UNDER THE SUN. 

kind of thing had been, to use the invariable Ameri- 
can locution when speaking of the ravages of civil war, 
i knocked into a cocked hat' by contending partisans. 
In La Soledad, we lived in an easy fashion. We 
dined without any table-cloth, and with a great many 
more knives than forks. We occasionally carved a 
fowl with a bowie-knife. Our claret had been drawn 
direct from the wood into calabashes of potters' ware, 
kneaded and fired on the spot, and the white-seal 
champagne had been opened by the simple process of 
knocking the neck off the bottles. It was very un- 
conventional when we sallied forth on a stroll to see 
the mats which served as doors to the Indian huts all 
drawn on one side, and the inmates making their sim- 
ple preparations for retiring for the night, such pre- 
parations consisting chiefly in everybody taking off 
what little he had on, and curling himself up in a ball 
on the straw-littered ground. The family mule was 
tethered to a post outside, and the background was 
filled up by the family pigs and poultry. It was the 
county of Tipperary with a dash of a Bedouin douar, 
and a poetic tinge of the days of the Shepherd Kings 
of Palestine. Everybody had, however, not gone to 
bed. There was life at La Soledad ; life half of a de- 
votional, half of a dissolute kind. The stone churches, 
as I have said, had been ' knocked into a cocked hat/ 
but Ave Maria was sounding on a little cracked bell 
suspended between three scaffold poles, and a dusky 
congregation — all Indians — were kneeling on the 
threshold of a wigwam somewhat larger, but fully as 



THE DIVERSIONS OF LA SO LED AD. 183 

rudely fashioned as its neighbours, where an Indian 
priest was singing Vespers. There could not have 
been a more unconventional church. The poor cele- 
brant was desperately ragged and dirty, and his vest- 
ments were stuck over with little spangles and tar- 
nished scraps of foil paper ; but he had a full, sonor- 
ous voice, which seemed to thrill his hearers strangely. 
Two great twisted torches of yellow wax were placed 
on the altar, which looked like a huge sea-chest. An- 
other torch, of some resinous wood, flamed at the en- 
trance of the hut, and threw the kneeling worshippers 
into Rembrandt-like masses of light and shade. On 
the altar were the usual paltry little dolls — not much 
paltrier than you may see in the most superb fanes in 
Italy or Spain — but there was one singularly unconven- 
tional ornament. The poor cur a of the church, I was 
told, had waited on the railway officials and begged 
for something to adorn his fabric withal : something 
4 European' the honest man wanted. They had given 
him a few dollars, and a couple of those enormous 
coloured lamps which at night are fixed in front of 
locomotives. One of these, a red one, another a green 
one, he had fixed on either side of his altar; and there 
they were, glaring out of the wigwam like two un- 
earthly eyes. Close to the church was a public gaming 
house, to justify Defoe's 

1 Wherever God erects a house of prayer, 
The Devil always builds a chapel there.' 

It was contemptuously tolerated by the French, on 
condition that no soldier of their nation should be 



1 84 UNDER THE SUN 

suffered to play in it, and that if any knives were 
used on the disputed question of a turn-up card, the 
proprietor should be liable to be hanged. But the 
Mexicans are admirable gamesters, and very rarely 
stab over their play. They prefer lying in wait for 
you in the dark, and admonishing you, by a punc- 
ture under the fifth rib, or a ball in the occiput, that 
you had best not be so lucky at cards next time. 
The gambling-house had nothing of the conventional 
Frascati or German Kursaal aspect about it. It was 
just a. long wigwam, open in front, and with some 
rough planks on tressels running along its whole 
length. It reminded me of a hastily improvised re- 
freshment booth at a cricket match. There was no 
'tapis vert,' ^unless the sward on which the tressels 
rested could pass muster as a ' green carpet.' There 
were no pure Indians present. Gambling, cheating, 
and robbing] are the business of the Spanish half- 
castes. These exemplary gentry lined the long 
table, erect, statuesque in their striped blankets 
and great coach-wheel hats, motionless, save when 
they extended their long skinny hands to plant their 
stakes, or to grasp their winnings. With the excep- 
tion of an occasional hoarse cry of ' Tecoloti' — refer- 
ing to a chance in the game — c Gano todo,' C I win all,' 
or 'Pierde el Soto,' 'The knave loses,' there was 
silence. The game was Monte, of which it is suffi- 
cient to say that it bears a vague affinity to lansquenet 
and to blind hookey, and is about one hundred times 
more speculatively ruinous than vingt-un or un- 



THE DIVERSIONS OF LA SOLED AD. 185 

limited loo. At La Soledad the stakes were dollars, 
halves, and quarters, and even copper coins. I saw 
one man win about five pounds on a turn-up. He 
lost all and more within the next five minutes, and 
stalked away apparently unconcerned: whether to 
bed, or to hang himself, or to wait for a friend and 
murder him, I had no means of ascertaining. Not 
many days afterwards I had the honour of being 
present at several entertainments, of which Monte 
was the object, in the City of Mexico. There we 
were quite conventional. We gathered in full even- 
ing dress. We had wax lights, powdered footmen, 
and cool beverages handed round on silver salvers. 
In lieu of the poor little silver and copper stakes of 
La Soledad, the piles of gold ounces and half doub- 
loons rose to a monumental height ; but there was no 
difference in the good breeding of the players. The 
blanketed rapscallions of La Soledad were just as 
phlegmatic over their Monte as the wealthiest dons 
in Mexico. 

We watched this small inferno for some time; 
and I was much amused to observe that one of the 
most sedulous of the punters was a gaunt half-caste 
boy who, in a ragged shirt and raggeder drawers, 
had waited on us at dinner. The young reprobate 
must have risked a year's wages on every turn-up ; 
but his employers did not seem to think that there 
was anything objectionable in his having adjourned 
from the dining-room to the gambling-table. 

About ten o'clock the establishment was closed in 



1 86 UNDER THE SUN. 

a very summary manner by a French patrol, who 
marched along the length of the booth, sweeping out 
the noble sportsmen before them as though with a 
broom that had a bayonet in it. And life at La 
Soledad being terminated, we went to bed. For my 
part I sincerely wish I had walked about all night, 
or had laid down in front of the great fire by the 
French guard-house. I must needs sleep in a wooden 
hut with a palm thatch, and I was very nearly bitten 
to death. There were mosquitoes, there were fleas, 
there were cockroaches — unless they were scorpions 
— and, finally, 0, unutterable horror ! there were 
black ants. I sometimes fancy that a few of those 
abominable little insects are burrowing beneath my 
skin to this day. 



THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. 

'They call it,' quoth the Canonigo, 'Puebla de los 
Angelos; but, for my part,' he continued confiden- 
tially, ' I don't think it Avould do this City of the 
Angels much harm if the Yerdugo were to come 
hither, and hang every man, woman, and child at 
Puebla to a gallows forty feet high. Hombre !' went 
on the Canonigo, c I think Puebla would be all the 
better for it ; for, look you,' and here he sank his 
voice to a whisper, ' everything that walks on two 
legs in this city, and who is not a guerrillero — a 
brigand — is either a gambler, or a receiver of stolen 
goods.' 

These were hard words, indeed, to ( hear from a 
patriotic Mexican gentleman, and a dignified eccle- 
siastic to boot, concerning a city so ancient and 
illustrious as Puebla. But the Canonigo knew what 
he was about. It was at the little village of Amo- 
soque, a few miles from our destination, that our 
clerical friend uttered the strictures, recorded above, 
on the character of the Pueblanas. Now I knew no- 
thing as yet of Puebla; but I should have been quite 
prepared to agree with anybody who had told me 



188 UNDER THE SUN 

that a little hanging — with perhaps a trifle of drawing 
and quartering — would have done a world of good to 
the people who congregated round our carriage win- 
dow at Amosoque. 

' Mala gente ! mala gente !' murmured the Canon- 
igo, looking at the Amosoquians who trooped up to 
the coach window, and stared in at us with sad fierce 
eyes mutely eloquent with this kind of discourse : ' I 
should like a wheel ; I a horse ; I that stout man's 
coat; I his hat; I his dollars; and I his blood.' 'Mala 
gente !' cried the Canonigo, drawing his head in some- 
what abruptly, as an Amosoquian of very hungry 
aspect uttered the word ' Caridad !' in a tone which 
far more resembled a curse than a request. 'Por 
Dios, amigo,' quoth the Canonigo, 4 1 have nothing for 
you. Mala gente !' he concluded, sinking back on the 
cushions and taking a very vigorous puff at his cigar, 
4 Mala gente' — which, being translated, may be ac- 
cepted as signifying ' blackguards all : a bad lot.' 

Whenever you halt in a town or village of Old 
Spain your equipage will be surely surrounded by 
silent, mooay men, wrapped in striped blankets or 
tattered cloaks, and with shabby hats slouched over 
their brows, who will regard you with glances that 
are sad, but not fierce. But faded as is their aspect, 
they have a quiet, resigned mien, not wholly destitute 
of dignity. Yonder tatterdemalion of the Castiles 
seems to say : 'lam destitute ; but still I am a Don. 
Poverty is not a crime. I involve myself in my vir- 
tue, and have puffed prosperity away. I am bankrupt, 



THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. 189 

but it was through being security for a friend. I am 
Don Dogberry, and have had losses. I held shares 
in the Filibusters' Company (limited). The company 
is being wound up, and another call on the contribu- 
tories will be made the day after to-morrow. If you 
like to give me half a peseta, you can.' 

But New Spain ! But Amosoque ! That small, 
wiry, leathery, sooty-looking fellow is a half caste. 
Watch him scowling at you in his striped serape — 
farther south called a poncho — his huge coach-wheel 
hat like a cardinal's whitewashed, and minus the tas- 
sels ; his loose linen drawers bulging through the 
slashes in his leathern overalls. Salvator might have 
painted him, but Salvator should have made some 
preliminary sketches in a Seven Dials slum and a 
Bowery whisky cellar, to get his hand in. The man 
of Amosoque utters nothing articulate save an occa- 
sional grunt of 'Caridad!' but his eyes are full of 
speech. They say, ' Your throat is precisely the kind 
of throat I should like to cut. I have cut many 
throats in my time. I am a bankrupt, but a fraudu- 
lent one. My father suffered the punishment of the 
"garrote vil;" and my brother-in-law is a garrotter 
in Orizaba. Give me a dollar, or by all the saints in 
Puebla, I, and Juan, and Pepe, and Fernan here will 
follow the coach and rob it.' 

Amosoque is a great mart for spurs. The c E spue- 
las de Amosoque' are renowned throughout Mexico, 
and the spur makers, I conjecture, allow the beggars 
to take the goods 'on sale or return.' They thrust 



190 



UNDER THE SUN 



them in, four or five pairs in each hand, arranged 
starwise, at the windows, reminding you, in their 
startling spikiness, of the hundred-bladed penknives 
with which the Jew boys used to make such terrific 
lunges at the omnibus passengers in the old days, at 
the White Horse Cellar. These spurs of Amosoque 
are remarkable for nothing but their length and 
breadth — the rowels are not much smaller than cheese 
plates ; but you can no more get clear of the place 
without purchasing a pair of ' espuelas,' than you can 
leave Montelimar in Provence without buying a packet 
of i nougat.' I have forgotten the name of that village 
in Old Spain where fifty women always fly at you 
and force you to buy embroidered garters. A simi- 
lar assault, though a silent one, is made on you at 
Amosoque. 

But our mules are hackled to, again, and the 
mayoral has filled his jacket pocket with a fresh sup- 
ply of pebbles to fling at their ears if they are lazy. 
Bump, bump, thud, thud, up the middle and down 
again. We are again travelling on the hard road. 
This kind of thing has been going on for many days ; 
and this kind of village we have halted at over and 
over again. Ojo de Agua was very like Nopaluca ; 
Nopaluca was very like Acagete ; and all these were 
very like Amosoque. We are out of the dark defiles 
of the Cumbres — horrifying mountain passes, gray, 
lagged, arid, cataractless ; no sierra caliente has greeted 
our eyesight since we left Orizaba. The open has 
been mainly desert, intolerable dust and caked baked 



THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. 191 

clod producing nothing but the nopal and the maguey, 
the prickly pear and the cactus. The former is pic- 
turesque enough, and besides, it yields the juice, 
which, fermented, the Indians and half castes call 
pulque, and on which they get swinishly intoxicated. 
An adult maguey is very stately to look upon ; but 
goodness keep all nervous ladies, and people given to 
dreaming dreams, and young children, from the sight 
of the Mexican prickly pear. The plant assumes the 
most hideously grotesque forms. It is twisted, and 
bent, and gnarled like metal scroll work which some 
mad giant has crumpled up in his fingers, in a rage. 
It is a tangle of knotty zigzags interspersed with the 
prickly fruit, which can be compared to nothing but 
the flattened faces of so many demon dwarfs, green 
with bile and thickly sown with bristles. The prickly 
pear, to me, is Bogey.* 

Let me see, where was it, between Orizaba and 
this evil place of Amosoque, bristling with spurs and 
scoundrels, that we picked up the Canonigo ? Ah ! I 
remember, it was at Sant' Augustin del Palmar. We 
reached Sant' Augustin at about two o'clock in the 
afternoon, just as the diligencia from Mexico had 
drawn up at the door of the principal fonda, and pre- 
cisely in time for the diligence dinner. Now I would 



* It may be mentioned that the heraldic cognisance of the Mexican 
nation bears intimate reference to the prickly pear. The legend runs 
that Cortes the Conquistador, during Ms march to Mexico, descried an 
eagle perched upon a nopal; and when the country achieved her inde- 
pendence four centuries afterwards 'the bird and bush' became the 
' Mexican arms.' 



1 92 UNDER THE SUN. 

have you to understand that the chief dish at the 
coach dinner in all regions Iberian, both on the hither 
and thither side of the Atlantic, and even beyond 
the Isthmus and under the southern cross, is the 
Puchero :* print it in capitals, for it is a grand dish ; 
and that the puchero is the only thing in Old or New 
Spain concerning -which tolerable punctuality is ob- 
served. You have heard, no doubt, of the olla- 
podrida as the 'national' dish of Spain; but, so far 
as my experience goes, it is a culinary preparation 
which, like the rich uncle in a comedy, is more talked 
about than seen. While I was in Mexico city my eye 
lighted one day on a placard in the window of a 
'bodegon' or eating-house, in the Calle del Espiritu 
Santo, setting forth that on the ensuing Thursday at 
noon 'una arrogante olla' would be read}^ for the 
consumption of cavaliers. I saw this announcement 
on Monday morning, and for three days I remained 
on tenter hooks expecting to partake of this arro- 
gant olla-podrida. I concc aled my intention from my 
hospitable host. I was determined to do something 
independent. I had travelled long in search of beef; 
there might be, in the arrogant olla, a bovine element ; 
and the efforts of long years might be crowned at 
last with success. I went on Thursday ; but the 
vinegar of disappointment came to dash my oil. 4 Hoy, 

* The names of both the national dishes of Spain are derived from 
the utensils in which they are served. A puchero is a pipkin, and an 
olla an earthenware pot. Podrida means simply ' rotten' — observe the 
singular corruption of sense in the French ' pot pourri,' a vase full of 
dried roses and fragrant spices. 



THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. 193 

no,' said the keeper of the bodegon, i maiiana se 
abra.' There was to be no arrogant olla that day, 
there would be the next. Maiiana means to-morrow ; 
and to-morrow to a Spaniard means the Millen- 
nium. I have never tasted an olla, arrogant or sub- 
missive. 

But of the puchero I preserve the pleasantest 
remembrances. There is beef in it : boiled beef : the 
French bouilli, in fact. There is bacon. There are 
garbanzos (broad beans), and charming little black- 
puddings, and cabbage, and delicate morsels of fried 
banana. It is very wholesome and very filling ; and 
there is no use in your complaining that an odour of 
garlic pervades it; because the room and the table- 
cloth and your next neighbour are all equally redolent 
of the omnipresent 'ajo.' The puchero (poured from 
its pipkin) is in a very big platter; and what you 
have to do is to watch carefully for the dish as it is 
passed from hand to hand ; to take care that it is not 
diverted from you by a dexterous flank movement of 
a cunning caballero manoeuvring behind your back, 
or by the savage cavalry charge of the German bag- 
man opposite. Seize the dish when you can, and hold 
on to it like grim Death with one hand, till you have 
filled your plate. Never mind if the lady next you 
looks pleadingly, piteously, upon you. She is the 
weaker vessel. Let her wait. Fill yourself with 
puchero ; for you will get nothing else in the way of 
refreshment, save chocolate and cigars, for the next 
twelve hours. There is a proverb which justifies the 





194 UNDER THE SUN 

most brutal selfishness in this regard, and which I 
may translate thus : 



' He who lets puchero 
Is either in love, or asleep, or an Ass.' 

Clutch it, then, for when it has once glided away you 
will never see it again. 

For a wonder the puchero at the diligence dinner 

at Sant' Augustin del Palmar was not punctual. We 

had had soup; we had had frijoles (black beans fried 

in oil), we had had a seethed kid; but no puchero 

made its appearance. The traveller next to me, a 

stout black- whiskered man, in a full suit of black 

velveteen, enormous gold rings in his ears, and with a 

particoloured silk sash round his waist, grew impatient. 

' Caballeros,' he cried, after another five minutes' 

delay, ' I am a plain man. I am a Catalan. Juan 

Estrellada is well known in Barcelona. But human 

patience has its limits. I propose that if the puchero 

is not at once brought in, that we rob this house and 

throw the landlord out of window.' The proposal 

was a startling one ; but the Catalan looked as if he 

meant it; and I was much moved to remark that a 

murmur, seemingly not of disapprobation, ran round 

the table. A gentleman in a cloak, two guests off, 

remarked gutturally, ' Es preciso :' which may be 

taken as equivalent to ' Ditto to Mr. Burke,' and to 

an opinion that robbing the establishment was the 

right kind of thing to do. You are so continually 

falling among thieves in Mexico that your moral 

sense of honesty grows blunted ; and you feel inclined, 



THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. 195 

when people come to you for wool, to send them away 
shorn. Fortunately for the landlord, the majority of 
the guests were philosophers, and had betaken them- 
selves to smoking; and, fortunately for ourselves, just 
as the Catalan seemed to be preparing to put his 
resolution to the vote two gingerbread-skinned Indian 
boys came staggering in with the charger of puchero 
between them, and we fought for the meal like so 
many wolves, and I didn't come off the worst, I can 
assure you. 

It was when I had secured, with great internal 
joy and contentment, the last remaining black-pud- 
ding in the dish, that I noticed that my right-hand 
neighbour — the Catalan was on the left — had suffered 
the puchero to pass. He told me that he ate but once 
a day ; that he preferred to dine at six or seven ; and 
that this was a fast day, too, and that he must keep 
his c ayuno.' I had noticed him, when we alighted, 
clad in a black cassock and a tremendous ' shovel' — 
which brought the Barber of Seville and Basilio to 
my mind at once, trotting up and down, saying his 
breviary, and puffing at a very big cigar. This was 
our Canonigo. The good old man! I can see his 
happy, beaming face now, his smile calm as a moun- 
tain pool environed by tall cliffs, his clear, bright, 
trusting eyes. I can hear his frank, simple discourse : 
not very erudite, certainly, often revealing a curious 
inexperience of the world and its ways, but infinitely 
full of candour, and modesty, and charity. He held 
a prebendal stall in the cathedral of San Luis Potosi, 



196 UNDER THE SUN 

to which he was now returning, via Puebla and 
Mexico city, having journeyed down to Jalapa to see 
a brother in high military command, who lay sick in 
that unwholesome city. I call him ' our' Canonigo ; 
for my friend and travelling companion, who had 
been separated from me by stress of company at the 
inn dinner-table, rejoining me, when we went into 
the colonnade to smoke, recognised the prebendary of 
San Luis Potosi as an old friend, and embraced him 
affectionately. The old gentleman was travelling in 
a rusty old berline of his own, but gave heartrending 
accounts of the hardships of the road he had endured 
since he left Jalapa. The post-houses were, indeed, 
very short of mules, to begin with: some thousands 
of those useful animals having been impressed by the 
French commissariat and transport corps. We had 
been tolerably successful in the way of mules, simply 
because my friend, among his other attributes, was an 
army contractor, and had most of the post-masters 
under his thumb; but the poor Canonigo had been 
frequently left for hours, destitute of cattle, at some 
wayside venta. It is not at all pleasant, I assure 
you, so to cool your heels and your coach wheels, 
while the Indian hostess sits on the ground, tearing 
her long black hair, and wringing her sinewy brown 
hands, and crying out that the Mala gente — the brig- 
ands — are in the neighbourhood, and will be down 
in half an hour, to smite everybody, hip and thigh. 

Nothing would suit my host but that the Canonigo 
should take a seat in our carriage, and be of our party 



THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. 197 

up to Mexico. The good priest was nothing loth, for 
he owned that he was dreadfully frightened of the 
brigands, who had been committing frightful atro- 
cities lately on the Jalapa road. I might have men- 
tioned to you, ere this, that we had brought with us 
from La Soledad a sufficiently imposing escort, in the 
shape of an entire company of French infantry, who 
journeyed with us on the 'ride and tie' principle: 
half of them crowded inside and outside a kind of 
omnibus we had picked up in the post office at Ori- 
zaba, and half of them hanging on to the wheels — the 
omnibus often required pushing up hill or dragging 
out of a rut — or riding on the mules, or trudging 
through the sand or over the pebbles with their sha- 
koes on the points of their bayonets, and their blue 
cotton handkerchiefs tied under their chins, with, 
perhaps, a damp plantain leaf superadded. These 
were the merriest set of fellows I ever met with; and 
they laughed and smoked and sang songs and capered 
all the way up to Mexico. They never asked us for 
drink -money, and were uniformly respectful, polite, 
and cheerful. They had a little boy-soldier with 
them — an 'enfant de troupe' in training to be a 
drummer — who was their pet and plaything and darl- 
ing ; and for whom, when he was tired of riding in or 
outside the omnibus, they would rig a kind of litter, 
made of knapsacks and ammunition blankets laid on 
crossed muskets, and with a canopy above of pocket- 
handkerchiefs tied together and held up by twigs. 
And they would carry the little man along, the sol- 



UNDER THE SUN 



diers singing and he joining in, with a ' Tra la, la! 
Tra la, la !' and the rest of the company beating their 
hands in applause from the top of the 'bus. There 
were but two officers with the company — the captain, 
who rode with us, and a sub-lieutenant, who preferred 
occupying the box seat of the longer vehicle. The 
captain was a pudgy little man, who, his stoutness 
notwithstanding, wore stays. He had been in Algeria, 
and, according to his showing, whenever he and Abd- 
el-Kader met, there had been weeping in the Smala 
and wailing in the Douar. He had been through the 
Crimean campaign, and, not very obscurely, insinu- 
ated that he, and not Marshal Pellisier, should, if the 
right man had got his deserts, have been made Duke 
of MalakofF. In fact, the fat little captain would have 
bragged Major Longbow's head off. He overflowed 
with good humour, however, and had a capital bari- 
tone voice. The sub, on the other hand, was a moody 
gaunt man, whose solitary epaulette seemed to have 
made him at once low-spirited and lopsided. It was 
as well, perhaps, that he did not form one of our 
party; for he evidently hated his captain with great 
fervour, and when they met, off duty, there was gene- 
rally a squabble. ' I know my Duty, but I also know 
my Rights/ the sub used to mutter, looking fixed 
bayonets at his superior officer. He was scrupulously 
attentive to his duties, however, and never missed 
saluting his pudgy chief. I think the captain would 
have been infinitely rejoiced had the omnibus toppled 
over one of the yawning precipices in the Cumbrera, 



THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. 199 

and had the dismal chasm comfortably engulfed that 
cantankerous sub-lieutenant. 

But the Canonigo had a berline. Well; that was 
very soon got rid of. The post-master, who was also 
landlord of the fonda where we dined — I remember 
that he expressed a hyperbolical wish to kiss my 
hands and feet at departing, and that he obliged us 
with two bad five-franc pieces in change for the napo- 
leon we tendered him — would have none of the canon- 
ical equipage. ' Yale nada,' it is worth nothing, he 
said contemptuously. He hoped that the Canonigo 
would leave it ' until called for,' and that he would 
never call for it. But he was not destined to profit 
by the relinquishment of the vehicle. At first I sug- 
gested that it should be devoted to the use of the can- 
tankerous sub -lieutenant, and that fatigue parties of 
light infantry should be harnessed to the pole, and 
drag it; but this proposal did not meet with much 
favour — especially among the light infantry — and the 
sub himself vehemently protested against making his 
entrance into Mexico, l before his chiefs,' in a carriage, 
which he declared to be fit only for a quack doctor. 
'There may be some,' he remarked, with a sardonic 
glance at the baritone captain, 'who would like to 
play Dulcamara, or imitate Mengin in a Roman hel- 
met, selling pencils in the Place de la Concorde ; for 
my part, I know my Duties, and I know my Rights/ 
In this dilemma Pedro Hilo was sent for. Pedro, a 
rather handsome half-caste, was the administrador or 
steward to the lordly proprietor of a hacienda — a 



200 UNDER THE SUN. 

maguey plantation in the neighbourhood. He was 
accustomed to buy everything, even, as my friend 
hinted, to the portmanteaus, wearing apparel, and 
other spoils of travellers who had been waited upon 
in the stage coach by a select body of the Mala gente. 
Pedro came, saw, and purchased. He was a man of 
few words. ' Twenty dollars' — pesos fuertes — he said, 
and he drew a gold ounce from his sash and spun it 
into the air. 'Arriba!' cried Pedro Hilo, 'Heads. 
Heads it was, and the administrador stuck to his text 
of twenty dollars. A doubloon — scarcely four pounds 
' — is not much for a berime, albeit the thing was woe- 
fully the worse for wear; but what was to be done 
with it? The bargain was concluded, and the Canon- 
igo pocketed the gold ounce. 

As we were leaving Sant' Augustin del Palmar, 
our omnibus escort making a brilliant show with 
their scarlet pantaloons and bright guns and bayo- 
nets, we passed the determined Catalan, who was 
girding himself up to ascend the roof of the down- 
ward-bound diligence. 'I wish we had a few soldiers 
with us,' he remarked, as he took in another reef of 
his particoloured sash. ' A prod from a bayonet now 
and then might remind the postillion that it is his 
duty to drive his mules, and not to go to sleep un- 
der his monstrous millstone of a hat. Who ever saw 
such a sombrero save on a picador in the bull-ring? 
In Barcelona such hats would be put down by the 
police. I have paid for my place in the interior/ he 
continued, 'but the malpractices of the postillion and 



THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. 20 r 

the mayoral — who, I am assured, is in league with 
all the gangs of brigands between here and Cordova 
— can no longer be tolerated. I intend to mount the 
roof; and the first time that pig-headed driver goes 
to sleep again, I propose to myself to blow out his 
brains.' So he went away, significantly slapping a 
pouch of untanned leather at his hip, and which I sur- 
mised contained his Colt's revolver. A determined 
fellow, this Juan Estrellada from Catalonia, and the 
very man to be useful in a street pronunciamiento. 
I fancy that he was somewhat nettled that no practi- 
cal upshot should have followed his proposal to rob 
the fonda and throw the landlord out of window, and 
that he was anxious, before he reached Vera Cruz, to 
do something, the memory of which posterity would 
not willingly let die. 

The Canonigo was excellent company, but his 
excessive temperance somewhat alarmed me. His 
'desayuno' — literally breakfast — would be taken at 
about four o'clock in the morning ; for we always re- 
commenced our journey at daybreak. Then he would 
take a cup of chocolate — a brown aromatic gruel 
mixed thick and slab — with one tiny loaf of Indian 
corn bread. And nor bite nor sup would he take 
again till sunset. The worst of it was that we were 
not always sure of finding supper when we reached 
the town or village where we had elected to stay the 
night. The Canonigo, however, seemed totally in- 
different to our lighting upon an Egypt without any 
corn in it. His supper was always ready, and it 



202 UNDER THE SUN 

seemed to serve him in lieu of dinner, and lunch, and 
all besides. He produced his grass-woven cigar-case 
and begun to smoke. .Not papelitos, mind. Every- 
body in Mexico — man, woman, or child, Spaniard, 
half-caste, or Indian — inhales the fumes of tobacco 
wrapped in paper, all day long. But the Canonigo 
was a smoker of puros, the biggest of Cabanas. They 
didn't make him sallow, they didn't make him ner- 
vous ; and he never complained of headache — at least 
through smoking. On one occasion the worthy gen- 
tleman made the confession, c Tengo mala cabeza' — 
4 My head is bad.' It was on the night before we 
arrived at Amosoque. We chanced to put up at a 
venta kept by a Frenchman, whose wife was a capital 
cook, and whose cellar was, moreover, stocked with 
capital wine. He gave us an excellent supper, and we 
subsequently ' cracked' — I believe that is the correctly 
convivial expression — sundry bottles of that very 
sound Burgundy wine called Moulin-a-vent. Well, we 
were four to drink it, and the temperate Canon could 
scarcely count as one. He had a thimbleful, however 
— two thimblefuls, perhaps — nay, a bumper and a half 
— and the cockles of his good old heart were warmed. 
In his merriment he sang a wonderful song, setting 
forth how a donkey, wandering in a field, once fell 
upon a flute in which a shepherd had 'left' a tune. 
The donkey tootled, and the tune ' came out;' where- 
upon — 'Aha!' brays the conceited animal, 'who shall 
say that donkeys cannot play the flute?' 

Then the Canonigo, merging into another mood, 



THE CITY OF THE ANGELS. 



like Alexander at his feast, began to tell us about the 
saints — of the wonders worked by St. Lampsacus and 
St. Hyacinth, St. Petronilla and St. Jago of Compos- 
tella. And then he fell asleep, and I can't help 
thinking that he woke up the next morning slightly 
flustered about the ' cabeza,' and that the Moulin-a- 
vent might have had something to do with the 
severity with which he spoke about the inhabitants 
of the City of the Angels. c However,' I said, as we 
drove into Puebla, 'we shall see — we shall see.' 

We duly entered La Ciudad de los Angelos ; but 
the Teetotum Laws forbid that I should proceed at 
once to tell you what we saw there. The fingers of 
Fate gave another twist to the Eoulette-wheel of 
life. Round whirled the ball; round spun the tee- 
totum, and down it came at last, with Afkica upper- 
most. 



COCKPIT ROYAL. 

4 Six days of the week they do nothing, and on Sun- 
day they go to the bull-fight.' Such is the awful 
charge I have heard brought against the inhabitants of 
Madrid. But something, after all, may be urged in 
favour of a bull-fight. It is a national, a royal amuse- 
ment. Ferdinand the Seventh established a School 
of Tauromachia at Seville. Bull-baiting, too, is one 
of the oldest of English sports. Something approach- 
ing it used to take place in the streets of London 
every Monday morning, within very recent times, 
and until, indeed, the cattle market was removed 
from Smithfield to Islington, nay, even since the 
aforesaid removal, I have occasionally seen much 
sport got out of a lively young bullock between 
Farringdon-street and the Old Bailey to the immi- 
nent peril of Mr. Benson's shop windows. Perhaps 
there may be also a trifle to be said in favour of 
the bull-ring. You will not hear it said by me, 
for I have gone through my course of tauromachia, 
and hold a corrida de toros to be the most brutal, 
cruel, and demoralising spectacle to be seen on this 
lower earth, after the King of Dahomey's ' great cus- 
tom.' Still there are people who like it. 



COCKPIT ROYAL. 205 



So much for Bos ; but who dares to defend cock- 
fighting? No one, I should hope. It is undeniably- 
cruel, and as undeniably demoralising ; since it leads, in 
England at least, to gambling and to the undue con- 
sumption of alcoholic liquors. Again, a cock-fight 
not unfrequently ends in a man-fight. That the 
heinous, turpitude of the thing is deeply impressed 
on the English mind is obvious from the proverbial 
expression employed to denote anything unusually 
and superlatively profligate and audacious — that 'it 
beats cock-fighting.' Yery properly, this barbarous 
sport has been put under the special ban of the Eng- 
lish law. It is reached by the provisions of the act 
for the prevention of cruelty to animals, commonly 
known as ' Dick Martin's.' Lawyers, cunning of fence, 
have sometimes striven to show, in appeal cases, that 
the cock is not a domestic animal; but the judges all 
ranged in Westminster Hall — a terrible show — have 
decided that' Chanticleer is as much an animal as a 
donkey ; and more than one amateur of the cockpit 
royal has expiated his fondness for the gallinaceous 
tournament in county jail. There was that poor 
young Marquis, for instance, who indulged in the 
luxury of a private cock-fight in his own grounds on 
a Sunday morning. Soon did Nemesis, in the shape 
of a Society's constable, overtake that sporting peer. 
There was a terrible scandal. It is true that the 
marquis was not sent to the treadmill; but the case 
against him was proved, and his lordship, if I re- 
member aright, was fined. That, at least, was some- 



206 UNDER THE SUN. 

tiling. I dwell the more particularly on this case, 
as, the moment I found cock-fighting and Sunday 
morning associated in the phrase I had penned, my 
ears began to tingle, and my cheek to blush with re- 
morseful shame. Ah! I should be the last wretch 
in the world to moralise on the wickedness of cock- 
fighting, for, not many years since, I deliberately 
attended a cock-fight. It was on a Sunday morn- 
ing, too. I may as well make a clean breast of it, 
and allow the whole sad truth to be known. I 
was born to be a 'frightful example' to the more 
virtuously disposed of my species ; and I have little 
doubt that all the misfortunes I have since under- 
gone, or which I may be doomed to undergo, spring 
directly from, or will spring from, that cock-fight. 
The only thing I can plead in extenuation is, that 
the combat I attended did not take place within the 
London bills of mortality, or within the sound of 
English church bells. The deed was done on the 
shores of the Mediterranean Sea, and on the coast of 
Africa. 

I was at Algiers. I had just been reading in the 
English papers how a whole bevy of noblemen and 
gentlemen, disguised under the most plebeian aliases, 
had been arrested at a sporting public-house — Jemmy 
Somebody's — in London, and marched ignominiously 
through the public street to the police-court, where 
they were each fined five pounds : all for cock-fight- 
ing. The case against them was clear. The plumed 
bipeds, the metal spurs, the weights and scales, the 



COCKPIT ROYAL. 207 



pit itself, had all been found, and duly produced in 
court by inexorable inspectors. It was shown that a 
great deal of money had been laid on the combat. 
'Serve them right,' quoth a stern gentleman, to 
whom I read the report of the case. ; I'd have sent 
every man Jack of them to prison for six months, 
with hard labour.' This downright opinion was 
necessarily provocative of argument. Another gen- 
tleman present, a mild and genial person, remarked 
that he really did not see much harm in cock-fight- 
ing. The birds, he added, evidently liked fighting ; 

and so long as the natural spurs only were used 

But the stern gentleman wouldn't hear anything in 
palliation of that which he termed an abominable 
and degrading exhibition of cruelty and ruffianism. 
It had now grown to be about twelve at noon ; and it 
so fell out that Abdallah, the guide attached to the 
hotel, sent to ask, with his duty, what amusement 
the gentlemen would like to have provided for them 
that present Sunday : adding that a capital cock-fight 
was to come off at two o'clock precisely at the Cafe 
de 1'Ancienne Kiosque, on the road to Moustafa 
Superieur. We had been arguing so long on the 
pros and cons of cock-fighting, without arriving at 
any satisfactory conclusion, that Abdallah' s proposi- 
tion came upon us like the refreshing spray from a 
hydropult on a dusty day. The Gordian knot was 
severed. The stern gentleman and the mild gentle- 
man, and your humble servant, were unanimous that 
the best thing to be done was to proceed to the scene 



2o8 UNDER THE SUN. 



of action and compare notes on what we saw. So we 
hired a carriage and went off to the Cafe de 1'Ancienne 
Kiosque. I beg to repeat that all this took place in 
Africa. In England we should not have dreamed of 
doing such a thing ; nor, dreaming, should Ave have 
dared. 

But it was Sunday. Long years have passed 
since, in pages precursors to those in which I now 
write, I was permitted to discourse on the aspect of 
Sunday in London, and on the different Sabbaths 
which men, in. their pride, or their strict conscien- 
tiousness, or their sheer indifference, had made to 
themselves. I have spent five hundred Sundays in 
twenty different lands since I first took pen in hand 
and told how I had heard ' Sunday bands' playing in 
the Parks, how I had heard English mechanics enjoying 
their 'Sunday out' in suburban tea-gardens. And 
am I, or are you, or is our patron Society any nearer, 
now, the solution of the vexed question of how Sun- 
days should best be spent, and which of our human 
Sabbaths is most acceptable to the Divine Ordainer 
of all things? That the seventh day, or the first 
day — for we are scarcely agreed as to whether it 
is properly number one or number seven — should 
not be spent in cock-fighting seems clear enough; 
but remember, again, that what I am telling of took 
place in Africa, in a country governed by a Koman 
Catholic power, numbering among its subjects Turks, 
Jews, heretics, fire -worshippers, and Pagan negroes. 
Man was made for the Sabbath, they tell you, grimly 



COCKPIT ROYAL. 209 



scowling, north of the Tweed. The Sabbath was 
made for man, they hold in latitudinarian France, 
and even in Lutheran Germany. But how is a 
government to impose a Sabbath upon so many races 
of men, and of so many ways of thinking? Religious 
politics run as high in Algeria as elsewhere. The 
Mahometan Arabs call the Christians, dogs. The 
orthodox Turks are continually expressing a desire 
to defile the graves of the fathers and mothers of the 
heterodox Moors, and both concur in hating the 
schismatical Kabyles. The negroes are mere idola- 
ters and Obeahmen. Turks, Moors, and negroes con- 
cur in loathing and despising the Jews. The Gal- 
licans in Algiers hint that the Catholicism of the 
Spaniards who colonise Oran is tinged with strange 
heresies and excessive Mariolatry; and the Maltese 
sailors resolutely refuse to pray to the Saints in the 
French calendar. The resident British community 
import tracts ; try a little prosely tism without any ap- 
parent results ; squabble among themselves, and make 
no secret of their convictions that their neighbours 
are going to Jehanum. As for the Jews, they look 
upon Moslem and Nazarene alike, with the feelings, 
harboured from time immemorial, but harboured in 
an occult manner. And yet, amidst this confusion 
of mosques, cathedrals, chapels, synagogues, and 
Mumbojumbo houses, Trappish convents, and mara- 
bout koubbas, nobody in Algiers, extraordinary to 
relate, thinks of quarrelling or fighting about Sunday. 
Everybody enjoys his Sabbath as seemeth him best. 



210 UNDER THE SUN. 

To what causes must the absence of dispute as to 
the observance of the Algerine Sabbath be ascribed? 
To the warmth of the climate ? To the indolence or 
placability of the people ? To the tolerance of the 
clergy? Scarcely, I conjecture. Hot as is the climate, 
and lazy the people, there are enough activity and 
energy about to make Sunday the noisiest day in the 
week. The clergy are just as intolerant as the autho- 
rities permit them to be ; and the priests of one sect, 
not being allowed to burn or plunder those of another, 
console themselves by preaching against and cursing 
their neighbours. The real reason is, that a casting 
vote in all matters, secular or ecclesiastical, is given 
by the dominant power — by the eminently tolerant, 
unprejudiced, and unbelieving French government. 
I hope I am not libelling that government by hinting 
that, theologically, it is a little more than sceptical. 
Sunday is a clay when everybody is allowed, and, in- 
deed, expected, to make merry ; and the Gaul being 
at bottom a lighthearted and mercurial soul, he sees 
nothing very wrong in the social organisation of a 
colony in which there are three Sabbaths instead of one. 

I will not say that I pursued precisely this train 
of thought as the carriage bore us along the very 
dusty road leading to the Cafe de l'Ancienne Kiosque, 
and ultimately to Moustafa Superieur ; but the road- 
side was fertile in materials on which future reflec- 
tions might be founded. It was Sunday out on the 
most extensive scale, and with the oddest combina- 
tion of Oriental and European characteristics. Group 



COCKPIT ROYAL. 



after group of French soldiers, military coveys of 
red-legged partridges, were scattered along the broad 
highway ; and in the keen zest in which they were evi- 
dently enjoying their Sunday offered a very marked 
contrast to the English warriors whom you meet 
listlessly wandering about the streets of provincial 
towns, and whose mental condition never seems to 
me to extend beyond these stages : first, that of de- 
spair at not having money enough to get drunk; 
second, that of having it, and being drunk; third, 
that of having got sober, and wanting to get drunk 
again. The third s,tage is analogous to, but not iden- 
tical with, the first. The British private, who has 
tasted the sweets of the beer-shop, is in a position 
more fully to appreciate the poetical reminder that 
the sorrow's crown of sorrow is in the remembrance 
of happiness. Ah ! if under some blessed fiscal dis- 
pensation the English soldier could only be supplied 
with cigars three for a penfty ! He would still visit 
the canteen, I suppose; but I would lay any odds 
that he would not get tipsy half so often ; that he 
would not be half so brutal, so stupid, or so dis- 
orderly ; and that he would not find time hang with 
such awful ponderosity on his hands. Cigars three 
a penny ! My panacea is a cheap one. I have but 
one addition to suggest: a theatre for twopence, in 
lieu of the filthy public-house and the blackguard 
music-hall. WitlT cheap cigars and cheap theatrical 
amusements you would soon find a sensible diminu- 
tion in your number of courts-martial, in the in- 



212 UNDER THE SUN 



mates of your barrack cells, and the number of your 
punishment drills, your extra guards, your stoppages, 
and your bloody stripes laid on the backs of poor 
brave fellows who get into trouble because they do 
not know what to do with themselves.* Cigars three 
a penny, I say, and Box and Cox for twopence, in 
preference to the 'Memoirs of Lieutenant Melchesi- 
dec Bethel,' that sainted subaltern of foot, or the 
'Beatified Baggage-wagon Woman,' price thirteen 
shillings per thousand for distribution. 

Cigars three a penny were very common in the 
mouths of the French warriors on the road to Moustafa 
Superieur. Scarcely a private but had his cheap roll 
of tobacco ; nor did his officers seem to be too proud 
to smoke cigars at the same price. Tobacconists in 
Algiers will sell you so-called Londres and Kegalias at 
as high a price as you are foolishly willing to give ; but 
the prices are essentially ' fancy' ones, and the cigars 
themselves but the sweepings of the French Regie. 

Given a fine Sunday afternoon, and several hun- 
dreds of military men swaggering or strolling along 
hi the direction of a cafe where a cock-fight is about 
to take place; the odds, in England, I opine, would 
be laid on all those military men being intent on 
witnessing the cock-fight in question. Did your 
betting lay that way in Algeria, however, you would 
lose. Every nationality here has its special and ex- 
clusive Sunday amusement; but cock-fighting is not 
one to which the French are addicted. c Comment!' 

* Flogging, thanks to Mr. Otway, exists no longer in ou£ army. 



COCKPIT ROYAL. 



they would cry. c Spend two hours in seeing two 
miserable birds peck one another to pieces : mais c'est 
une horreur!' The Frenchman's Sunday means a 
long day of dawdling, of staring at shows and sights, 
of ogling pretty girls, of sipping moderate and thin 
potations, and of winding up at billiards or the play. 
The French officers have an occasional bout at par- 
tridge-shooting or pig-sticking, and, at outlying sta- 
tions, can cultivate perilous laurels, if they choose, 
in hunting the lion; but ideas of 'Le Sport,' as it is 
understood in France, have not yet penetrated to 
Cesarean Mauritania. Horse -racing languishes. Many 
of the Mahometan gentlemen have magnificent studs 
of thoroughbreds, but they decline to enter their 
full-blooded Arabs for plates unless the French 
owners of racehorses can exhibit a faultless pedigree 
with each of the horses they enter. And a racer 
must have a very long lineage to match with one 
in the studbook of an Arab sheikh. The native 
gentry, too, are great falconers; but the French 
scarcely know a hawk from a hernshaw, and usually 
regard a falcon as a kind of semi-fabulous bird, not 
often seen out of heraldic scutcheons, and which 
ladies used to wear on their wrists like bracelets 
some time in the dark ages. The Arabs understand 
cock-fighting, and among themselves can enjoy it 
keenly ; but, on the whole, they prefer the contests 
of quails, and even of pheasants — which are here 
c game' to the backbone, and desperately pugnacious 
— to those of cocks. Moreover, they never bet; and 



214 UNDER THE SUN 



to Europeans a cock-fight without money won and 
lost is as insipid as card-playing for 'love.' The 
real amateurs, aficionados as they call themselves, 
of cock-fighting are the Spaniards, of whom there 
are some thousands domiciled in Algiers, either as 
agriculturists, as mechanics, or as shopkeepers. They 
wear their national costume ; speak very little French ; 
scowl at the Arabs as though they were the self-same 
Moriscos whom they were wont to persecute in Spain ; 
and have their own church and their own priests. 

The jewellers' shops in Algiers are full of rudely 
fashioned representations in silver of human eyes, 
noses, arms, legs, and ears ; and these I used to take 
at first as being in some way connected with the 
Mahometan superstition of the evil eye ; but in reality 
they are votive offerings, and their chief purchasers 
are Spaniards, who devoutly hang them up on the 
altars of favourite Saints, in gratitude for their re- 
covery from deafness, toothache, chilblains, ophthalmia, 
or other wise, as the case may be. For the rest, these 
Algerine Spaniards, usually emigrants from Cartha- 
gena and Valencia, are peaceable citizens enough, 
and give the government but little trouble. They 
are honest, industrious, and eminently temperate — - 
bread, garlic, tobacco, and cold water being their 
principal articles of diet. They occasionally indulge 
in stabbing affrays, when arrears of ill-feeling, arising 
from bygone cock-fighting and card -playing disputes, 
are cleared up ; but as a rule the use of the knife is 
strictly confined to the family circle. Pepe has it 



COCKPIT ROYAL. 215 



out with Jose, and then the thing is hushed up, and 
the swarthy gentleman who is taken to the hospital 
with a punctured wound beneath the fifth rib is 
reported to have accidentally slipped down upon an 
open knife as he was cutting the rind of a piece of 
cheese. They don't run mucks, and they seldom 
stab the gendarmes. They are inveterate gamblers 
and finished cock-fighters. The Maltese sailors, of 
whom there are usually a numerous tribe in Algiers, 
belonging to the speronares in port, are likewise 
enthusiastic admirers of the gallimachia ; but the 
Spaniards, to cull a locution from the pit, l fight shy' 
of the brown islanders. Your Maltese, not to mince 
matters, is a drunken, quarrelsome dog, fearfully 
vindictive, as lazy as a Duke's Hall Porter, and a 
great rogue. Rows are rare at Algerian cock-fights ; 
but if ever a difficulty occurs, and the sergents de 
ville are called in, the Maltese are sure to be at the 
bottom of it. 

Cafes, breweries with gardens attached, and danc- 
ing-saloons, are plentiful in the neighbourhood of 
Algiers. As the road grows crowded and more 
crowded with soldiers and sailors, with French work- 
men in blouses, and French farm-labourers in striped 
nightcaps and sabots; with German artisans with 
their blonde beards, belted tunics, and meerschaums; 
with little grisettes and Norman bonnes with their 
high white caps ; with grave, dusky Spaniards in 
their round jackets, bright sashes, pork -pie hats, 
clubbed hair and earrings; with Greek and Italian 



216 UNDER THE SUN 



sailors, and fishermen from the Balearic Isles, all 
mingled pell-mell; with the Jews in their gorgeous 
habiliments, clean white stockings, snowy turbans, 
and shiny shoes; with the Jewish women with high 
conical head-dresses of golden filigree, and long fall- 
ing veils of lace, and jewelled breastplates, and robes 
of velvet and rich brocade; with Arabs in white 
burnouses and flapping slippers, who stalk grimly 
onward, looking neither to the right nor to the left; 
with Berbers and Kabyles swathed in the most 
astonishing wrap -rascals of camel's hair, and goat's 
hair, and cowskin; with fez-capped, bare-footed, and 
more than half bare-backed Arab boys, shrieking out 
scraps of broken French ; with Zouaves, so bronzed 
and so barbaric m; appearance as to make one doubt 
whether they have not turned Mussulmans for good 
and all ; with sellers of fruit, and sherbet, and dates, 
and sweetstufF, and cigars, and lucifer-matches, you 
begin at last to wonder whether the days of the 
Crusades have not returned, and whether this motley 
crowd, belonging to all nations, and jabbering all 
dialects, is not part of the enormous host whilom 
encamped at Jaffa or Ascalon. Surely the Duke of 
Bethlehem or the Marquis of Jericho must be some- 
where hereabouts. Surely Richard of England must 
have patched up a truce with the Sultan Saladin, 
and the camp-followers of the Christian and the 
Saracen army must be making merry together. No ; 
this is only an ordinary Algerine Sunday. It is the 
Christian Sunday, remember; but it is worthy of 



COCKPIT ROYAL. 217 



remark that the Hebrews who had their Sabbath 
yesterday, and the Mahometans who had theirs the 
day before, do not evince the slightest disinclination 
to take an extra holiday on the real or Nazarene one. 
The Cafe de l'Ancienne Kiosque was rather a 
tumbledown place of entertainment, and might have 
been easily mistaken for one of the inferior guin- 
guettes outside the barriers, whither, in olden times, 
ere Paris, both outside and inside its barriers, had 
grown to be the dearest city in the world, one used 
to repair to drink petit bleu at eight sous the litre. 
The different nationalities were enjoying themselves, 
each after its peculiar fashion, at the Ancienne Ki- 
osque*. The burnoused Arabs were gravely squatting 
on the benches outside, paying a trifle, I suppose, to 
the proprietor of the cafe for that privilege ; for they 
brought their own tobacco, and partook of no other 
refreshment. A noisy group of Frenchmen were 
wrangling over a 'pyramid' game of billiards — the 
once green cloth of the table tinted dun gray from 
long use and many absinthe stains, and grown as full 
of rents as poor Robin's jerkin. At the side-tables 
some sailors were drinking drams. Sailors are cos- 
mopolitans in that respect. The Germans had a back 
yard to themselves, where they were playing nine- 
pins and wallowing in drouthy draughts of biere de 
Mars. The cockpit was at the extremity of a long 
garden, originally laid out in the French or sham 
classical style, but where the indigenous and spiky 
cactus had long since had it all its own way, carrying 



218 UNDER THE SUN 



things before it literally with a high hand, and driv- 
ing out the modest plants of Europe with sticks, and 
staves, and sharp-pointed knives. Next to the horse- 
armoury at the Tower, a grove of cactus is about the 
most formidable array of lethal- like weapons I know. 
We paid a franc apiece, and were admitted into a 
square barn-like apartment, the walls whitewashed, 
and the roof supported by heavy beams. Within 
this quadrangle had been constructed a theatre, pro- 
perly so called, consisting of twenty rows of seats, 
disposed one over the other in circles, and gradually 
widening in diameter as they ascended. You entered 
this theatre by means of ladders and trap- doors, of 
which there might have been half a dozen in the 
different grades of seats, and I may best explain my 
meaning by saying that the outside of the structure 
looked, from the floor of the barn, like a gigantic 
wooden funnel. The neck of the funnel was the 
cockpit itself. We climbed up to the highest range 
of seats, and, getting as close as we could to the two 
gendarmes who represented authority, looked curi- 
ously around and beneath. There was little fear 
of disturbance, however. The ' roughs' were not 
present that Sunday morning ; indeed, we heard 
subsequently that it was Saint Somebody's day — a 
Maltese saint — and that the brown islanders were 
protracting their devotions at their own church. The 
Spaniards, who had all doubtless attended mass be- 
fore eleven a.m., were the chief occupants of the 
theatre ; and into it were crammed, tight as herrings 



COCKPIT ROYAL. 219 



in a barrel, at least two hundred and fifty amateurs. 
Turn where } r ou would, were visible the swarthy 
faces, bright black eyes, closely chopped whiskers, 
upper lips and chins blue from constant shaving, 
ear-lobes decorated with rings of gold, hair in clubs, 
in queues, in nets, and in bags, pork-pie or soft felt 
hats with rosettes, round shaggy jackets, loose necker- 
chiefs, and curiously- worked gaiters or embroidered 
slippers, so distinctive of the children of sunny Spain. 
They were all smoking. On such solemn occasions 
as bull-fights and cock-fights, the papelito or paper 
roll is accounted puerile and jejune, and the genuine 
weed or puro enjoyed. Such puros as were in a 
state of combustion here were probably not of the 
Algerine or three-a-penny species. They were big, 
black, odorous, and probably smuggled from the 
Peninsula. The company had obviously taken a 
good deal of garlic with their morning meal; and, 
if you will again be pleased to recollect that the 
month was May, and the country Africa, I need not 
enter into any details concerning the somewhat 
powerful aroma which issued from the two hundred 
and fifty amateurs. But a better behaved, a quieter 
audience I never saw. It is a pity they had not 
something worthier than a cock-fight in which to 
display their good behaviour. 

I am so ignorant of the technology of cock-fight- 
ing as to be unaware of the precise meaning of a 
'main;' but we saw five different battles between 
^N^ brace of birds. They were, for the most part, 



220 UNDER THE SUN. 

as game as game could be. One only — it was the 
third fight — a red long-legged fellow, ' El rubio,' as 
he • was called in the betting, showed, figuratively 
speaking, the white feather. He essayed to run 
away from his adversary, and even to scale the walls 
of the pit ; whereat there were dull murmurs among 
the auditory, and cries of c Fuera ! — fuera el rubio' — 
4 Out with him !' His owner very speedily put an 
end to the growing discontent by jumping into the 
pit, seizing the recreant gladiator, wringing his neck, 
and stamping upon him. He then handed over a hand- 
ful of dollars, his loss on the event, to the owner of 
the opposition bird, and philosophically lighting a 
fresh puro, regained his seat, and betted throughout 
the next fight on a white bird with a gray gorget. 

Cockpit Royal ! As I gazed on the fierce struggle, 
I could not but recall the mild Wordsworth's melli- 
fluous description of Chanticleer under pacific cir- 
cumstance : 

' Sweetly ferocious round his native walks, 
Pride of his sister-wives, the monarch stalks ; 
Spur-clad his nervous feet, and firm his tread, 
A crest of purple tips the warrior's head ; 
Bright sparks his black and rolling eyeball hurls, 
Afar his tail he closes and unfurls. 
On tiptoe rear'cl, he strains Ms clarion throat, 
Threaten'd by faintly answering forms remote. 
Again with his shrill voice the mountain rings, 
While, flapp'd with conscious pride, resound his wings.' 

Are not the numbers melodious? Is not the descrip- 
tion charming? Was there ever a prettier amplifica- 
tion of cock-a-doodle-do-o-o-o ? But here he was — the 



COCKPIT ROYAL 



h 



' monarch' ' sweetly ferocious' — with a vengeance. I 
have heard ere now the t erm ' pitted against each 
other,' and I know not what may have been formerly 
the practice in cock-fighting England; but in this 
Algerine pit there did not seem to be any need to 
excite the combatants for the fray. The two owners 
stepped into the arena, each with his bird in his hand. 
Solemn declarations were made and written down as 
to the ages and prior performances of the champions. 
Weights and scales were then produced, and the 
birds were duly weighed. The appointed judge sub- 
jected them to a minute examination. Their spurs 
and beaks were then rubbed with the half of a 
lemon ; they were put down at opposite corners of 
the pit; and the owners, bowing to each other, went 
to their places. Not a cry, not a gesture, was used 
to excite the birds to the attack. There was a quiet 
walk round the pit ; then a few sidelong looks, a careful 
mutual examination of the opposite party's general 
build and make-up ; then a rush, a rise on the wings, 
another, another ; then it seemed as though a small 
feather-bed had been suddenly ripped up, and the 
plumes scattered in all directions. Such a furious 
clapperclawing, such a tooth and nail exhibition of 
gameness ! But not a crow was heard. Not a cry, 
not a gasp even of j)ain. The loudest sound audible 
was the rustling of feathers. Then the rivals would 
emerge from the downy cloud ; stalk round the pit 
again ; and eye and take stock of each other as before. 
Then would come rush number two, and another rise 



222 UNDER THE SUN 



and another furious clapperclawing. And so on, round 
after round for perhaps half an hour. 

This volume not being Bell's Life in London, I 
am absolved from chronicling the minutiae of the 
various rounds. In the first fight, I may remark 
that one of the birds, a black one, was defeated early. 
Time was called; he could not come up to it; he 
consequently lost the fight, and was put out of his 
misery, but not contumeliously, by his owner. The 
victor expired just as he was being handed over the 
barrier to his triumphant proprietor. The next duel 
was between a little gray fiend of a bird and a gaunt 
white creature of most doleful mien. How handi- 
capping is managed in the Algerian Cockpit Royal I 
do not know; but there was evidently a great dis- 
parity in bottom and bone between these two. The 
pluck, however, of the gaunt white creature was in- 
domitable. He grew rather wild after about eighteen 
minutes' clapperclawing, and staggered rather than 
walked round the pit : the little gray fiend strutting 
by his side, and ever and anon whispering in his ear, 
so it seemed, like an importunate bore ; but in reality 
finding out fresh tender parts about the unhappy 
creature's head wherein to progue him with his sharp 
beak. It was very horrible to see this gaunt white 
creature gradually turn first a streaky and then a 
complete crimson, with the blood he lost. It was 
more horrible when both his eyes were gone, and 
blind and 'groggy,' but undismayed, he still went 
reeling about, occasionally closing with his enemy, 



COCKPIT RO YAL. 223 



and clawing him. At last, in the twentieth round, I 
think, the little gray fiend coolly went up to the 
luckless white knight; looked in his face as though 
he were laughing in it; and with one trenchant blow 
of his beak cut the poor wretch's throat. I am sure, 
by the blood that spurted out, that the great artery 
had been severed. The white cock balanced himself 
for a moment on one leg, then threw back his head, 
gave one smothered 'cluck,' and as sharply as a 
human hand can be turned round from the position 
of supination to that of pronation, fell over dead, 
and turned his toes up. So may you have seen, in 
the shambles, a bullock stricken by the slaughterer's 
poleaxe. One stupid moment motionless he stands, 
as though all unconscious that his skull is cleft in 
twain, and that his brains lie bare. But anon the 
quicksilver current of dissolution searches every vein, 
and plumbs every nerve. The giant frame trembles ; 
the legs give way ; and the great beast topples over 
into so much beef. 

Can any extenuation for the manifest cruelty of 
this sport be found in the fact that the birds in 
Spanish pits wear only their natural horny pedal 
protuberances or spurs? This, like everything else, 
is a moot point. The uninitiated generally jump at 
the conclusion that a fight with steel or silver spurs 
is much more barbarous than one without. These 
sharpened glaives, they argue, inflict the most hideous 
gashes. On the other side, it may be shown that 
when spurs are used, the fight is over much sooner- 



224 UNDER THE SUN 

and that spurs, besides, give an equality in weapons 
to the combatants. A bird may be of the same weight 
and age as his opponent, but much overmatched by 
him in adroitness and endurance; yet it will often 
happen that when apparently at the last gasp, the 
bird who is getting the worst of it may turn the 
tables by driving his spur into his enemy's brain. 

To others I leave the task of drawing a moral 
from the tale I have told. As I went to the cock- 
fight, and it was Sunday, I am, so far as moralising 
is concerned, out of court. 



CUAGNAWAGHA. 

Cuagnawagha ! Cuagnawagha ! it is but a word. I 
may plead, at least, that it is fertile in vowels, and has 
not the spiky chevaux de frise appearance, when writ- 
ten down, which Polish and Hungarian and others of 
the Sclavonic family (those quadrilaterals of ortho- 
graphy) present. To me, even Cuagnawagha looks 
pretty in black and white. I have adopted the 
spelling accepted by those who rule over Cuagna- 
wagha, and are neighbours to it; but the Cuagna- 
waghians themselves are not much given to reading 
or writing. 

Cuagnawagha ! Cuagnawagha ! will you agree in 
the premiss that there are certain words — the names 
of things and places, and sometimes, but very rarely, 
of men — the bare sound of which will haunt you? 
That they should do so is not always the result of the 
associations they recall. Windermere is close to 
Patter dale ; yet the first is a name that haunts you, 
and is full of a soft and mysterious beauty. Patter- 
dale is one of the loveliest spots in Europe, but its 
sound is harsh, severe, and ugly. 

In all human probability, I shall never more be- 
hold Cuagnawagha — on this side the grave, at least. 

Q 



226 UNDER THE SUN 

On the other we may all see sights that shall astonish 
us. I was never in Cuagnawagha but once in my 
life ; I only passed fifty minutes within its confines ; 
I was thoroughly disappointed in all that I had come 
to see; yet Cuagnawagha, its name and itself, have 
haunted me from the day on which I first beheld it 
until this, and in my dreariest moments its dear name 
sweeps like soft music o*ver the chords of my heart, and 
lights up the dim old Vauxhall of my twilight with 
thrice fifty thousand additional lamps. I do not know 
why. I have seen the lions of the world, their manes 
and their tails, and have heard them roar. I can gaze 
upon the ocean without addressing it as Vast, and In- 
terminable, and Blue, and without bidding it Roll on — 
a request which, on my part 5 or any one else's, I hold 
to be one of surplusage, if not grossly impertinent. I 
have lost most of my enthusiasm about great rivers. 
I wait for the Ganges and the Indus, the Euphrates and 
the Amazon; but I have seen the Guadalquivir, the 
Ebro, the Tagus, the Rhone, the Rhine, the Mincio, and 
the Danube ; but I am of opinion that the Thames at 
Ditton, in th^t priceless half hour between your order- 
ing the stewed eels and the cutlets to follow and the ar- 
rival of the banquet itself, is brighter and more shining 
than any other river which I might have asked, again 
impertinently, to ' flow on.' The lions and the rivers, 
the cataract and the Alpine passes, are apt, indeed, to 
pall upon you when they are seen, not from choice but 
from necessity ; and goodness gracious ! how many 
miles would I willingly travel, and with peas in my 



CUAGNAWAGHA. 227 



shoes, to get out of the way of an Old Master, or a 
connoisseur given to talking about oue ! I almost 
blush to recall the irreverent terms in which I heard 
one of her Majesty's Messengers allude, the other day, 
to that sublime chain of mountains, the exploration of 
which has been undertaken by an association of Climb- 
ing-boys, and whose peaks, passes, and glaciers are so 
fascinating to our landscape painters that they seem 
to be quite unaware of the existence of any more sub- 
lime mountain scenery in the world. The Queen's 
Messenger called the sublime chain those ' something' 
Alps. So might you, if you had to carry a bag across 
them twenty times a year, in hail, rain, or sunshine. 
But Cuagnawagha has not lost one iota of its prime- 
val charms to me. My love for it is as fresh as — 
what shall I say ? — as your love for the face you al- 
ways love : for the face which, like that of Queen Vic- 
toria on the postage-stamps, never grows older. As it 
was in 1840, so is it in 1872, only younger, and fresher, 
and prettier (to you) ; so was it when your life began, 
so is it now you are a man, so may it be when you 
grow old. And I am sure, had Wordsworth ever seen 
Cuagnawagha, he would have written as melodiously 
about it as he has written of Grasmere or Dungeon- 
ghyll. 

Cuagnawagha is only an unpretending little Indian 
village on the bank of the River St. Lawrence, over 
against the French village of La Chine, one of the ear- 
liest settlements of the Jesuit missionaries in Canada 
(and so called by them in affectionate reference to the 



228 UNDER THE SUN 

labours of which the Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses are 
a record). It is some six-miles drive from the thriving 
and populous city of Montreal. 

This is not, perhaps, the first time you have been 
told that there are no more genial and hospitable folks 
in British North America (where capital punishment 
will never be abolished, so far as killing with kindness 
is concerned), than the inhabitants of Montreal. The 
Canadians generally labour under a notion — not an 
entirely mistaken one, perhaps — that their brethren of 
the Old Country do not hold them in sufficient estima- 
tion ; that the glare and bustle and sensational whirli- 
gig life of the United States offer greater attractions 
to English tourists who cross the Atlantic than the 
solid, steady, sober=sided existence of the British pro- 
vinces. They have an idea that an Englishman tra- 
velling in the States gets rid of Canada at an early 
stage in his journey, or just looks in upon it at the 
fag end thereof, and that the real centres of his curi- 
osity are in the cities of the Atlantic seaboard. The 
'Kenucks,' and the 'Blue noses,' and the other pro- 
vincials, murmur at this, but always in a placable and 
good-humoured manner. ' At least/ says Canada, 'the 
better half of Niagara belongs to us. At least, the Falls 
of Montmorency are equal to those of Gennessee ; at 
least, the St. Lawrence is not inferior to the Ohio, and 
the Thousand Islands beat Boston Harbour. There 
is not on the whole North American continent a city 
so picturesque as Quebec ; and if you are curious about 
redskins, we can show you plenty of Indians — fat, 



CUA GNA WA GHA. 229 



copper-coloured, prosperous, and happy, instead of the 
gaunt, dwarfed, half-starved wretches who are being 
"improved" off the face of the earth by the restless 
Yankees.' These grievances, however, do not prevent 
the Montrealese from pressing the heartiest of wel- 
comes on every stranger who comes within their gates. 
It is enough for them that he is a stranger, and they 
immediately take him in. He is asked out, systemati- 
cally and stubbornly, to dinner. If he pleads previous 
engagements, he is asked whether Monday week or 
Tuesday fortnight will suit him ; and the dinner comes 
due, and must be met, like a bill. The Amphitryous 
who cannot bag him for a dinner are fain to secure 
him for breakfasts or suppers or lunches. Then they 
drive him out in trotting-wagons in summer, and in 
sleighs in winter ; they take him to the club and to the 
c rink ;' they wrap him up, as in buffalo-robes, with 
kind offices and generous deeds. When I say that my 
experiences of Montreal hospitality, on the last occa- 
sion of my visit to the Royal Town, included the gift of 
a roll of Canada homespun sufficient to make a couple 
of travelling suits, and the loan of a railway- car, com- 
bining sitting-room, bedrooms, smoking-rooms, and 
kitchen, in which I travelled at my ease many hun- 
dreds of miles, you will be enabled to infer that the 
people of Montreal are not in the habit of doing things 
by halves, and that when they say they are glad to see 
you, they mean it. 

Hospitality has generally its price; and I have 
known more than one country where the price exacted 



230 UNDER THE SUN 

was slightly beyond the value of the article itself; 
but the terms on which kindness is obtainable in Mon- 
treal are not very onerous. You are not expected to 
praise everything you see, to make flowing speeches, 
or to write a book, declaring Lower Canada in gene- 
ral, and Montreal in particular, to be the grandest and 
most glorious country and city in the universe. Nor 
are you absolutely required to furnish the album of 
every young lady fresh from boarding-school, or at 
boarding-school, with autographs and cartes-de-visite, 
or to write scraps of poetry of your own composition 
(not to exceed thirty lines) on little bits of particol- 
oured silk, to be returned, post-paid, to localities a 
thousand miles away, there to be sewn into patch- 
work counterpanes. Nor are you asked for opinions 
on the abstract questions of Woman's Rights, Moral 
Suasion, or International Law. You are only expected 
to eat a great deal ; to pass the bottle ; to go round 
the Mountain ; to go through the Tube, and to visit 
Cuagnawagha. There are always plenty of kind friends, 
with knives, forks, bottles, carriages, and horses, to 
enable you to accomplish the first two feats. For the 
performance of the third, every assistance will be ren- 
dered you by the courteous officials of the Grand Trunk 
Railway of Canada ; and the Victoria-bridge at Mon- 
treal is, in its way, quite as great a wonder of the world 
as the Falls of Niagara. When you have dispatched 
that tremendous piece of engineering — when you have 
not only ridden through the tube on a locomotive, but 
walked through it, and inspected the identical rivet 



CUAGNAWAGHA. 231 



driven into the iron by the Prince of Wales, the last of 
I know not how many millions — you have done all 
that is required of you in Montreal, with the excep- 
tion of visiting Cuagnawagha. The name strikes you 
at once. What is it? where is it? you eagerly inquire. 
It is an Indian village, you are told, easily accessible. 
The best way is by road to La Chine, where you can 
obtain a canoe and be ferried across to the village it- 
self. The very word ' canoe' sets you all agog to go. 
Sunday, your counsellors continue, is the best day for 
a visit to Cuagnawagha. The squaws are then in their 
best dresses, and the papooses or children are neat and 
clean, for the inspection of visitors. It was on a Sat- 
urday afternoon that I made an appointment with a 
hospitable friend to start for Cuagnawagha at noon on 
the morrow. All night I dreamt about it. A radiant 
chaos filled my sleep of moccasins and wampum-belts, 
of wigwams and medicine -men, of war-paint and calu- 
mets, of tomahawks and scalps, of fire-water and un- 
buried hatchets, of gallant braves and beauteous 
squaws, of the Council Fire and the Happy Hunting- 
grounds. 

Sunday morning dawned. It was a Canadian sum- 
mer Sunday, which is perhaps saying enough ; but our 
open carriage had a hood, and the day, though warm, 
was so beautiful that we felt it would have been a sin 
to remain at home. Perforce, however, so fierce was 
the glare of the sun, we lingered in the cool shades of 
the St. Lawrence Hall Hotel until two in the after- 
noon. To broil in Canada was with me a new sensa- 



23 2 UNDER THE SUN. 

tion, for on the occasion of my last visit to Montreal, 
the thermometer had been at a whole flight of stairs 
below zero, and my tour round the mountain accom- 
plished in a sleigh, with such a jingling accompani- 
ment of bells as might have been envied by the cele- 
brated female traveller to Banbury Cross. But why 
did she not attach the bells to the cockhorse instead of 
to her toes? There are but two changes of the seasons 
at Montreal ; but they are pantomimic in their sud- 
denness. I could scarcely believe that the Mr. Hogan 
who suggested iced sangaree, or a trifle in the w r ay of 
a cobbler, ere we started for Cuagnawagha, was the 
same obliging host who, the last time I started from 
St. Lawrence Hall, had lent me the skin (seemingly) 
of a megatherium to wrap myself in, with a mighty 
fur cap, and a pair of sealskin gloves, like unto levi- 
athan his paws, and had whispered that half way 
round the mountain there were some excellent hot 
' whisky skins' to be obtained. 

The drive to La Chine was not very interesting. 
Few drives in North America, save where the scenery 
is mountainous, can be said to possess much interest, 
picturesquely speaking. The farming is all doubtless 
in strict accordance with the precepts of Jethro Tull, 
great-grandfather of Anglo-Saxon husbandry; but to 
the European eye it looks shiftless and slovenly. The 
fields are too large (which would scarcely be a fault 
in the eye of a farmer) ; there are ugly posts and rails 
in lieu of hedges, and the trees are few. Gentlemen's 
houses, parks, and pleasaunces you never expect to 



CUAGNAWAGHA. 233 



see. Add to this an all-pervading dust powdering 
the vegetation with the monotonous livery of Midge 
the miller, and those chronic Canadian nuisances, 
abundant turnpike-gates. There were plenty of cattle 
about, however, well bred and full of flesh, and the 
cottages along the road, although mainly of wood, had 
a substantial and satisfied appearance, as though they 
belonged to country folks who ate meat every day. 
I am inclined to think that meat twice, if not three 
times a day, would be nearer the mark, as the habitual 
dietary of the Canadian peasant or farmer, for they 
are both one here. Given a country where the babes 
and sucklings clamour for beefsteak at breakfast: — 
should not that country be a happy one ? 

There was the usual confusion of French and 
English nomenclature, and of Protestant and Roman- 
ist places of worship, and of people of Saxon and 
Celtic race along the road; but, as seems happily the 
case in Canada, the Gaul and the Saxon, the follower 
of Peter and the disciple of Martin, seemed to get on 
pretty well together. Fenianism was in an ugly em- 
bryo state when I was in Canada. It had scarcely 
got beyond its first foetal squalling in its cradle in 
Chicago; and the Canadian Paddy, so far as I had 
any experience of him, was a jovial, easy-going mortal, 
civil to the Saxon, obedient to his rule, and passably 
contented with plenty of work and high wages. I am 
inclined to hope, and even to believe, that the out- 
burst of Fenianism — now grown from a fretful wail 
to a frantic howl notwithstanding — the kind of Paddy 



234 UNDER THE SUN 

(the contented one) I have mentioned, is still in a majo- 
rity in Lower Canada. What he may be in the West, I 
am rather chary of opining. On this present Sunday 
he was evidently, so far as his patronage of French 
and English public-houses went, wholly free from pre- 
judice. 'The Queen's Arms' and ' Les Armes d'An- 
gleterre' were all one to him. I could not help 
thinking, as we saw these hybrid taverns, that half- 
and-half should properly be the only beverage sold 
there ; and when I passed a knot of scarlet-coated 
British Guardsmen issuing from a wayside hostel, I 
fancied an international version of the old nursery 
rhyme : 

' Qui est la ? 
A grenadier. 
Ou est votre argent ? 
I forgot. • 
Allez-vous en, ivrogne !' 

Conversations closely resembling the above were cer- 
tainly audible from time to time when the Guards 
were in Canada. Happy was it when they were 
content to demand a 4 pot of beer ' in lieu of the atro- 
cious ' white eye,' and the abominable 'fixed bayonets' 
— the cheap whisky, or cheap hell-fire of Canada. Not 
that the Guardsman was given in any marked degree 
to misbehave himself. He did not get tipsier, or with 
greater frequency, than his cousin of the line does in 
Gibraltar. He was much more sober in Canada than 
he is, generally, in London. The Guards were de- 
servedly popular with the people of Montreal, and 
went home 'as fit as fiddles.' Many obtained their 



CUAGNAWAGHA. 235 



discharge while in America, and married and settled 
in the province. They must have been quick about 
their sweethearting ; but next to a sailor's, is there 
anything shorter than a soldier's courtship ? Three 
Sundays might be given as a fair average. Let us 
take a virtuously inclined corporal. A regiment, we 
will say, disembarks on a Saturday night ; on the first 
Sunday afternoon you will meet your virtuously in- 
clined corporal walking down Notre-Dame-street with 
a young lady in a three-dollar shawl and a two-dollar 
bonnet. The next Sunday, if you happened to be 
passing down Bonaventure-street, you might catch a 
glimpse of the virtuously inclined corporal taking tea 
with the entire family of his innamorata ; cutting the 
bread-and-butter, carving the ham, nursing the mar- 
ried sister's baby, or handing the old grand sire a light 
for his pipe. And on Sunday number three, you 
heard that Corporal Smith had got leave to be married 
to a 'kenuck.' How do they manage it, these won- 
derful military men? What inflammatory quality is 
there in their scarlet coats to set maidens' hearts 
ablaze so ? How many weary months, years perhaps, 
did it take you to win the present Mrs. Benedict? 
Mind, I can't help thinking, that if civilians would 
adopt the short sharp mode of military courtship, the 
girls would meet tbem halfway. I heard of a train 
breaking down once on the Camden and Amboy Bail- 
road, and before a fresh locomotive could be brought 
to its assistance no less than three offers of marriage 
were made and accepted among the passengers. And, 



236 UNDER THE SUN. 

did you ever hear of a courtship more expeditious 
than that of the mystic William Blake, pictor ignotus ? 
He had had some great trouble. ' I pity you, William,' 
remarked a young lady. ' Then I am sure I love you 
with all my heart,' quoth William Blake; and they 
went off and got married at once. But if she had not 
added the endearing ' William ' to the expression of 
pity, that young lady might never have become Mrs. 
Blake. 

There was not much to remind one of the Celestial 
Empire at the clean little village of La Chine. It 
was nearly all French. The hotel, or tavern, was, as 
usual, half and half. The little sanded parlour was 
decorated with portraits of Queen Victoria and the 
late Duke of Wellington, side by side with a Madonna 
and Child, and his Grace the Archbishop of Quebec, 
in full canonicals, and the Montreal Herald lay on 
the table cheek by jowl with IS Echo du Canada. A 
French servant-maid brought us some English beer ; 
and on our expressing a desire to hire a canoe, the 
Scotch landlord hailed two boatmen, one of whom 
was an Indian and the other an Irishman, to 'pole' us 
across to Cuagnawagha. It only wanted a raven, and 
a cage, and the celebrated professor of Trafalgar- 
square, to make the exhibition of the Happy Family 
complete. 

We crossed the magnificent river : at this point 
far enough from the La Chine Rapids to be lying 
calm in the sun, like one sheet of burnished gold. 
There was no awning to the canoe, and a Venetian 



CUA GNA WA GHA. 23 7 



gondola would perhaps have been preferable as a con- 
veyance; but there was something after all in riding 
lightly on the bosom of the famous St. Lawrence in 
a real canoe of birch bark, with a real Eed Indian at 
the stern. I will say nothing of the Irishman at the 
prow, for he rather detracted from the romance of 
the thing. A Canadian voyageur now, softly mur- 
muring ' La Complainte de Cadieux,' or chanting in 
lugubrious tones the fearful history of Marie Joseph 
Corriveau and the iron cage of Quebec : such an 
oarsman would have left nothing to be desired. You 
must get on to the Ottawa river ere you can catch your 
voyageur. The Irishman and the Indian did not at- 
tempt the ' Eow, Brothers, Row/ or any other variety 
of the Canadian boat-song. It was worth coming a 
good many miles, however, to hear the Irishman en- 
deavour to make himself understood in the French 
tongue by the Eedskin, and that noble savage, not to 
be behindhand in courtesy, endeavouring to talk Eng- 
lish to the Irishman. I must not omit to mention 
that the noble savage wore a pea-jacket and a billy- 
cock hat, and informed us that, in addition to the skill 
and dexterity with which he feathered his oar, or 
rather his pole, he was 'one dam good pilot.' 

As the opposite shore was approached, the navi- 
gation became somewhat difficult, and the channel 
rather a matter to be faintly hoped for than confidently 
fixed upon. Several times we were, as I thought, 
within an inch of being 'snagged' — the 'snags,' in 
this case, not being trunks of trees, as on the Missis- 



238 UNDER THE SUN 

sippi, but sharp-pointed fragments of rock. However, 
the Indian successfully guided us through the watery 
labyrinth, and in some degree justified his claim to 
the title of i one dam good pilot.' There were more 
rocky fragments on the bank ; indeed, the littoral of 
the St. Lawrence, opposite La Chine, might remind 
the Eastern traveller of the shores of Arabia Petrsea ; 
and the quarter-of-a-mile walk or so, lying between 
the river and the village, was, to one of the visitors to 
Cuagnawagha, of a gouty constitution, and to another 
with tight boots, and to a third with bunions and an 
irritable temper, agonising. 

We brought up at last in a long straggling 
street, or rather lane, of hovels built of loose stones 
and planks nailed together in apparently as loose a 
fashion. Here and there, perhaps, a little mud had 
been used to finish off the corners, or stick on the 
chimney-pots; but looseness was the prevailing cha- 
racteristic of the street architecture. When I call 
these dwellings hovels, I use the word in no offensive 
sense. They were hovels in construction, but exceed- 
ingly clean, cxnd abundantly furnished. The doors 
and windows were all wide open, and the domestic 
arrangements of the inhabitants of Cuagnawagha 
were almost as fully exposed to public gaze as those 
of a doll's-house in Mr. Cremer's London shop-win- 
dows. As the majority of the houses comprised only 
one room, the publicity given to the domesticity of 
the place may be more easily understood. They were, 
as I have hinted, supplied with abundant chattels. 



CUAGNAWAGHA. 239 



I saw more than one four-post bedstead, several easy- 
chairs, and any number of profusely ornamented tea- 
trays. Next to these, the most fertile product of 
Cuagnawagha appeared to be babies. I could not at 
first make out Avhat had become of the children of 
medium growth, nor of the seven-year olds up to the 
ten-year olds; but I learnt subsequently that the 
elder ones were at church, and the younger at play in 
the cemetery. In Cuagnawagha itself the babies ruled 
the roast. They were very fat — of a rich oily fatness 
indeed, and, in the ridiculous swaddling-bands in 
which they were enveloped, looked not unlike very 
little sucking-pigs seen through reddish-brown spec- 
tacles. But all the babies I saw were, I am pleased 
to say, immaculately clean. Those who had any hair, 
had it of a lustrous raven hue, such as Horace Vernet 
has put on the head of the baby Napoleon, in that 
exquisite vignette where the hero is depicted, naked, 
and one hour old, sprawling on a fragment of tapestry. 
Their black eyes, too, had a merry twinkle ; and alto- 
gether their coppery hue was not unpleasing, and 
they were the nicest babies I had seen for many a 
long month. In Cuagnawagha a baby is called a 'pa- 
poose ;' and a solemn rite, the performance of which 
is exacted from all strangers, is that the papooses 
should be kissed. I had been warned in Montreal 
that the maternal squaws of Cuagnawagha were some- 
times actuated by mercenary motives in offering their 
babes to the caresses of tourists ; and that the request, 
4 Anglis, kiss papoose,' was not unfrequently followed 



240 UNDER THE SUN 

by another, 'Give little quarter'— meaning twenty-five 
cents. I took a provision of small money with me — 
the newest and brightest I could procure ; but the 
mothers of Cuagnawagha were that day in no merce- 
nary mood. At least, they did not actually beg for 
money. They clapped their hands for joy, and the 
papoose crowed in unison whenever we did present 
them with a backshish ; so that, on the whole, in this 
lane full of copper-coloured babies we had our money's 
worth and more. We would no sooner halt at an 
open threshold than cheery voices, in an amazing jar- 
gon of French and English, invited us to walk in. If 
we hesitated about intruding, the inevitable papoose, 
tightly swaddled and strapped on to a board, like 
a diminutive Egyptian mummy, was handed to us 
through the window. A gipsy woman of felonious 
tendencies might have made a fortune in ten minutes' 
perambulation of Cuagnawagha, by running off with 
the papooses thus offered on trust ; only, as the gip- 
sies are said to steal only Nazarene children, and the 
Red Indians themselves are by some ethnologists 
supposed to be of kin with the gipsies, those Zingarini 
persons might not have cared, perhaps, about stealing 
their own flesh and blood. 

I was given to understand afterwards that these 
Indians of Cuagnawagha were a very industrious and 
well-to-do community. The men hunted and fished, 
and were boatmen and river pilots ; the women stayed 
at home, took care of the papooses, and filled up their 
time by making baskets and creels, and embroidering 



CUA GNA WA GHA. 241 



those exquisite moccasins, slippers, pouches, fans, 
wampam belts, and other articles of bead and feather 
work which are so much in request in the fancy ba- 
zaars of Montreal and Quebec, and for which the re- 
tail dealers charge such exorbitant prices. The 
squaws of Cuagnawagha have certain market days for 
the disposal of their manufactures. On these occa- 
sions they are conveyed by their lords in canoes of 
birch bark across the river, and may be seen, with 
their black hair abundantly oiled, and their persons 
spruced up in infinite Indian finery, gliding from shop 
to shop in the most frequented streets of Montreal, in 
strange contrast to the European costumes around 
them. I did not hear that the Indians of Cua<ma- 
wagha, male or female, were much given to the con- 
sumption of fire-water, or to quarrelling or pilfering, 
or to the other generic weaknesses of the noble sa- 
vage when in a state of free nobility and nastiness. I 
did not see any liquor-shop in the place. The do- 
mestic affairs of the village are administered by a 
chief — John or Peter, or Big Bellows or Bear's 
Paw, was, I think, his name— but it does not matter 
now — who was reported to have done uncommonly 
well in the fur trade, and to be worth many dol- 
lars. I had the honour of an interview with this 
Sachem, who was sitting, after the manner of his 
subjects, at his open door, in a Windsor chair, and 
smoking the calumet of peace— an ordinary tobacco- 
pipe, containing, as I was led to infer from the odour, 
birdseye. He was old, and immensely fat, but very 

K 



242 UNDER THE SUN. 

affable. He showed me a pair of the most beautifully- 
embroidered moccasins I had ever beheld. Not to 
mince the matter, they served as coverings to his own 
stout legs and feet; but nothing could exceed the 
courteous manner in which he cocked up his bead- 
worked limbs on the window-sill, and allowed me 
narrowly to inspect, and even to smooth and pat 
them. The Sachem's house was so full of chattels 
that it looked like a broker's shop; and the name of 
his tea-trays was legion. He wore on his breast, and 
was evidently exceedingly proud of, a silver medal, 
bearing the effigy of King George the Fourth, and 
had, so far as I could make out, served at some re- 
mote period in the local militia. He had the usual 
twin engravings over his mantelpiece — the Madonna 
and the Queen of England, and was a stanch Conser- 
vative and a devout Roman Catholic. So I left him, 
never to behold him more, in this semi-ignored corner 
of the world, so close to civilisation, and yet so far 
from it. He was sitting under his own vine and his 
own fig-tree ; and who was there to make him afraid ? 
Not the British Government, surely, whose rule over 
these honest folks is mild, and equitable, and protec- 
tive; not the Pope of Koine, assuredly. In Lower 
Canada, the Roman Catholic religion seems to have 
lost the terrifying character which it is apt to assume 
elsewhere. The priest neither bullies, nor teases, nor 
grinds the faces of his parishioners. He is their mas- 
ter; for he is lawyer, arbitrator, journalist, school- 
master, letter-writer, match-maker, guide, philoso- 



CUAGNAWAGHA. 243 



pher, and friend, all in one ; but his spiriting seems to 
be done with infinite gentleness, and he is certainly 
beloved by a population who, but for his quietly pa- 
ternal despotism, would very likely be drunken, and 
savage, and profligate, and not peaceable, and affec- 
tionate, and docile. 

At one extremity of the village street there was a 
church, a bare structure of considerable antiquity, 
highly whitewashed. The irregular area before this 
edifice seemed to be the general try sting-place of the 
young squaws and the young braves of Cuagnawagha, 
who were sweethearting after the manner of young 
squaws and young braves the whole world over. The 
braves, I am sorry to say, had repudiated the slightest 
approach to Indian costume, and in the round blue 
jackets and glazed hats which they mostly affected, 
had somewhat of a sailor-like appearance. They were 
pure redskins, however, and half-castes were rare. 
Now a Red Indian in a blue jacket and a round 
glazed hat sounds rather anomalous and incongruous. 
Where were the feathers, and the war-paint, and the 
tattooing ? Not at Cuagnawagha, certainly. You must 
go much farther west if you wish to see the noble 
savage in his full native splendour and squalor ; and 
even in the wildest districts the Indian rarely fails to 
supply himself with a European outfit whenever he 
has an opportunity to do so. I remember a hard- 
hearted, but withal very amusing speculator from 
down East, telling me of a gambling transaction he 
had had with an Indian somewhere in the territory of 



244 UNDER THE SUN 

Colorado. ' The cuss,' tie observed, 4 had been tradin' 
hosses, and bought a lot of store clothes. There he 
was, in a stove-pipe hat, a satin vest and a coat and 
pants most handsome. We took drinks ; and I kinder 
froze to him till I had him comfortable over draw- 
poker in the verandah of the Cummin's House. Sir, 
in the course of three hours and three quarters I won 
of that Ingin all the money he'd got from tradin' 
hosses, and all his clothes, from the crown of his hat 
to the soles of his boots. Sir, it was very hot ; and, 
lawful sakes ! it was a sight to see that Ingin, a child 
of Adam, and as bare as a Robin, a walking away 
solemn, perspirin' with rage in the rays of the setting 
sun, and looking like a hot roast turkey. 1 The hot 
roast turkeys of Cuagnawagha had not yet been 
plucked of their feathers by speculators from down 
East, direct lineal descendants of the cunning man 
of Pyquag who questioned Anthony Van Corlcar the 
trumpeter out of his horse. 

But ! the squaws of Cuagnawagha. The elder 
squaws were unutterably hideous ; so they prudently 
stayed at home, and minded the papooses. The 
younger squaws were here, philandering. Such mel- 
low brunettes did I see, with nature's pure carmine 
mantling upon their dusky cheeks. Such lustrous 
blue-black tresses. Such liquid, lingering, longing 
eyes. If their foreheads had not been quite so low, 
and the chiselling of their mouths not quite so square, 
many of these girls would have been positively beau- 
tiful. Their figures, in early youth, are very shapely 



CUAGNAWAGHA. 245 



and graceful, and their gait a strictly 'gliding' mo- 
tion, as I noted above. A lady of our party admitted 
that they walked prettily, but that they turned their 
toes in. Another critic discovered that they walked 
on tiptoe, in consequence of the wretched condition of 
the pavement. I could only notice that they glided ; 
that their ankles were faultless, and that they were 
exquisitely shod. Moccasins they may have worn 
on week-days; this Sabbath their pretty feet were 
arrayed in brodequins and bottines of varnished 
and bronzed leather, of soft kid, and even of bright- 
coloured silk and satin. Otherwise, there was little 
European in their costume. Crinoline had not yet 
invaded Cuagnawagha. There was an upper garment, 
which was the inner garment — the innermost gar- 
ment, in fact — snowy white, leaving the arms bare, 
but very maidenly and modest. This was all they 
had for bib, or tucker, or bodice. Then came a pet- 
ticoat falling in straight heavy folds, and decorated 
round the bottom with three or four rows of ribbons, 
the whole offering a close resemblance to the garment 
known in operatic wardrobes as the c Amina skirt.' 
Over all, and covering the head, was a long mantle, 
in shape somewhat like a priest's cope — a square of 
fine broadcloth, of yellow, of red, or of black, and 
adorned with curious patchwork embroidery. The 
lady critic above mentioned complained that they 
went about with drawing-room table-covers over their 
heads; but what will not lady critics say? Such 
were the squaws of Cuagnawagha. Their necklaces 



246 UNDER THE SUN. 



and armlets of beads, ' their ribbons, chains, and 
ouches,' I need not dwell upon. As for their manner 
of receiving the addresses of the young braves, it was 
remarkably like that which, on previous occasions, I 
have observed in Kensington Gardens, in many pri- 
vate parlours, and on some staircases. 

We were turning our faces towards the shore 
again, wlien there issued from one of the hovels a pro- 
cession which we could not choose but follow. It was 
the funeral train of a little child. As at a Turkish 
funeral, the assistants came along at the double quick, 
but not jostling and hallooing as the Turks, or at least 
the Arabs, do. The men were first, absolutely run- 
ning, but with that grave concentrated expression in 
their faces, of which only Indians and Breton pea- 
sants seem masters. Then came a squad of squaws; 
and then, alone, the mother of the dead child, bearing 
in her own arms — whose could be better ? — the tiny 
corpse, which was in a species of wicker pie-dish, 
adorned with innumerable streamers of rainbow-hued 
ribbon, and strips of cloth. A bevy of dusky chil- 
dren, capering but silent, brought up the rear. We 
followed this curious train into the church, and I 
went up into a rickety gallery, and looked down on 
the coffin of the poor little papoose stranded in the 
midst of a big bier in the chancel, like a pincushion 
in a brewer's vat. The priest came, with his cross- 
bearer, and his acolytes and tapers and holy water, 
and the service for the dead was chanted ; but in the 
midst of a timid quavering of the 'Dies Irse,' there 



CUA GNA WA GHA. 247 



burst from the hitherto silent assemblage a prolonged 
and harrowing wail. It rings in my ears even now; 
and I can see the Indian women on their knees on the 
church pavement, rocking themselves to and fro, and 
howling dismally. It was savagery asserting itself. 
It was as the voice of the wild animal in the depths 
of the forest, mourning for her cubs. 

We followed the train again, away from the church 
and to the cemetery, and saw the papoose comfortably 
stowed away, gay-ribboned pall and all, in a quiet 
corner where the grass grew tall. Sleep soundly, 
papoose; thou art well out of a troublous world. 
Then we came back to the shore, and took boat and 
sped across the great river, and saw the last of Cuag- 
nawagha. And many and many a time, in far distant 
lands, have I recalled the rocky shore, the fat old 
chief, the gliding squaws, and the dead papoose with 
its rainbow pall. 



LITTLE OLD MEN. 

Error and I may be twin brothers ; but still I can- 
not help fancying that the age in which we live 
exhibits a sensible decline in the average number of 
Little Old Men, walking and talking in their ap- 
pointed time and their allotted section of infinite 
space. 

You, I, all the world, must remember how plenti- 
ful little old men used, or at least seemed, to be 
when we were young. Almost all of us must have 
had little old grandfathers, little old uncles, and 
especially little old godfathers, w T ho were in the 
pleasant habit of presenting us with guineas on our 
birthday, or pot-bellied silver watches, and of treat- 
ing us to the play at Covent Garden Theatre. ' No 
play for you co-night ;' that was a dire threat indeed 
in the golden age of the Rejected Addresses, when 
we, perchance, imperilled our prospect of dramatic 
entertainment by thrusting our little sister's doll 
between the bars and melting off half her nose. It 
appears to me that the children of the present age, 
when they go to the play at all, take their parents 
and guardians instead of being taken ; and as for 
little old godfathers and their birthday presents, it 



LITTLE OLD MEN. 



249 



is in the first place patent that the sponsor, as a 
philanthropist, is all but extinct, that when you meet 
your godfather he usually crosses to the other side 
of the street to avert the possibility of being com- 
pelled to ask you to dinner, and that the only notice 
your godmamma ever takes of you is to beg auto- 
graphs and cartes-de-visite, or to solicit your 'well- 
known extensive influence' in procuring a nice little 
Indian appointment, or something of that kind, for 
her son Ulric, aged twenty-seven, and a born fool. 

Presents ! When you are grown up, they want 
gifts from you ; when you are small, and they must 
perforce give you something, it is generally something 
cheap from the Lowther Arcade, or else a two-shilling 
book bound in pink calico with Dutch-metal binding, 
setting forth how happy Frank and Willy and Her- 
bert were at Concord House, or Euphuism Academy, 
with an Alexandre harmonium to perform upon, and 
a vivarium to amuse them out of school, under the 
benevolent auspices of Dr. Wise, the schoolmaster, 
and Mr. Loveboy, his assistant (who eventually goes 
into the church, and becomes Bishop of Bungaree, 
Central Africa). Xothing is ever said about Dr. 
Muff, or Mr. Canechild, or Professor Screwboy, or 
Mr. Swindleparent, B.A. These books are generally 
written by schoolmasters for the purpose of puffing 
(often in the most undisguised manner) middle-class 
schools. There were books about schools and school- 
boys, too, in the little old godfather days, but they 
were lifelike and true. Dr. Prosody was a kind 



250 UNDER THE SUN 

pedagogue, and patted Harry on his flaxen head 
when he gave his pocket-money to the blind fiddler, 
or behaved so nobly in not betraying his playfellows 
in that matter of the rifled orchard ; but what a 
tremendous flossing he administered to the traitor 
Philip, who should have confessed his share in the 
apple robbery, but allowed Harry to be brought 
within an inch of the 'horse 7 for his (Philip's) mis- 
deeds ! I say that godfathers and godmothers have 
degenerated into mere simulacra. They accept an 
awful responsibility with as much alacrity — and, as 
a rule, with as much sincerity — as the gentlemen 
who were wont to pervade Westminster Hall with 
straws in their shoes, and were ready to go bail for 
anybody, and to any extent, for half-a-crown. When 
we were young our sponsors made much of us, and 
left us fat legacies. I was blessed with one — a very 
little old gentleman who used to come from Finchley 
to Paddington once a month for the express purpose 
of hearing me my catechism. What has become of 
the conscientious people who used to renounce Satan 
and all his works, and the pomps and vanities of this 
wicked world, for you ? 

I walk down Chancery-lane, and dive into the 
mouldy yards of the Inns of Court ; I peep up stair- 
cases fretting with the dry rot ; I lift the musty 
curtains at the portals of the Great Hall of Pleas, 
and wander from the King's Bench to the Exche- 
quer, from the Common Pleas to the Lords Justices ; 
but I can discern no sign of the little old lawyer 



LITTLE OLD MEN. 251 



once so familiar to me. What has become of him ? 
Was he esteemed an intrinsic part and parcel of 
Mesne Process, and so swept away by my Lord 
Brougham ? Did he fade away and die of grief when 
the Petty Bag, the Pipe, the Pells, and the Palace 
Court were abolished ? By the little old lawyer, of 
course, I mean the practitioner who is either attor- 
ney or solicitor. The barrister is, and has always 
been, in nine cases out of ten, a big man, addicted to 
profuse whiskerage. Xow and then you see a little 
counsel at the Chancery Bar, but you can discern at 
a glance that he is not strong enough for Common 
Law, and that at the Old Bailey the jury — who like 
quantity, not quality, in counsel — would make light 
of him. He is only fit to descant, in a thin piping 
voice, on the infringement of a patent right in the 
matter of a fishtail-burner, and to quote precedents 
out of books well-nigh as big as himself. There is 
a play by Massinger, called the Little French Law- 
yer ; and the hero, who is almost a dwarf, is an 
advocate ; but then you must remember his nation- 
ality, and that in his days the line of demarcation 
between barristers and attorneys was not very 
strongly drawn. His name, La Writ, shows this. 

The little old lawyer I knew was never at the 
bar. He lived in Lincoln's-inn-fields, or dwelt over 
his offices in Bedford-row. He wore hair-powder, a 
large bunch of seals at his fob, and was frequently 
given to knee-shorts. He delighted in a neatly- 
plaited shirt -frill, and a petrified -looking brooch^ 



252 UNDER THE SUN 

that might have been a fossil oyster, secured in some 
bygone lawsuit (plaintiff and defendant got the 
shells), or the desiccated heart of a client. His blue 
bag was of immense size. He knew what old port 
wine was, and kept plenty of it in the cellars under 
the clerks' office ; nay, frequently, some was to be 
found of the right sort, with a bag of biscuits from 
Moxhay's, in one of the tin office boxes, labelled B — 
and Co. He never discounted bills, but lent money 
in the good old-fashioned way, on bond. He thought 
the Lord Chancellor the greatest of living beings, 
and ranked next to him, perhaps, his lordship's train- 
bearer. 

Sometimes he was a country lawyer, and then 
you may be sure that he lived in that comfortable 
red-brick house — the best, next to the rectory, in 
the village — with the flaming brass plate, like a 
brazen capias, on the door. He wore drab cords 
then, and gaiters, and was generally admired as a 
hard rider cross country. When he came to town, 
he stopped at the Gray's-inn Coffee-house; and was 
fond of seeing the Gamester, at Drury-lane. The 
little old lawyer, in town as well as country, has al- 
most disappeared. If your fancy, however, leads you 
to the cultivation of funerals, like poor crazy Lord 
Portsmouth, who was so fond of 'black jobs,' you 
may sometimes see the little old lawyer's frosted poll 
peering from the windows of a mourning coach, when 
a great lord or a rich dowager is going to the grave. 
Perhaps in one out of a hundred lawsuits which 



LITTLE OLD MEN. 253 

chances to be conducted with something like honour 
and gentlemanly feeling on either side, you may find 
the little old lawyer concerned for one or the other 
party. But he is growing very rare. In vain may 
you sweep the attorneys' table in the law courts, in 
the hope of lighting on his trim sable figure, his 
powdered head, and his gold-rimmed spectacles, his 
shrewd spirit looking through his clean withered face 
and many-puckered wrinkles, 'with eyes of helpful 
intelligence, almost of benevolence.' In his stead 
what do you behold ? Big fat lawyers with hoarse 
voices, who evidently sit in no awe of the judge, and 
patronise counsel in the most overbearing manner. 
Flash attorneys, who drive dog-carts, and bet, posi- 
tively bet. Worse than all of these, the dandy young 
attorneys, with hair parted down the middle, pioneers' 
beards, eye-glasses, turn-down collars, guard-chains 
with lockets and trinkets attached, peg-top trousers, 
and shiny boots. Woe for the day when the Avvocati 
del Diavolo, when the proteges of St. Nicholas, take 
to varnishing their boots and scenting their pocket- 
handkerchiefs ! I have seen some of these degenerate 
youths — not articled clerks, mind, but full-blown 
attorneys — walking down to Westminster with a bun- 
dle of papers in one hand, and a cigar in the other. 
The melancholy change that has come over a once 
solemn and demure profession, cannot be better 
summed up than in remarking that nothing is more 
common now than to see lawyers at the Opera and 
in the ranks of the Volunteers. 



254 UNDER THE SUN. 

When I had chambers in Deadman's-inn, there 
was a real little old lawyer, who had his offices at 
Number Nine. He arrived every morning punctually 
at ten, in a yellow fly — not a brougham, be it under- 
stood — from Balham, the locality of his country-house. 
It was my great delight to watch for his arrival, and 
see him alight from the yellow fly. It was all there : 
hair-powder, watch-fob and seals, knee-shorts — no, as 
I live, pantaloons and hessians! big blue bag, shirt 
frill, petrified brooch, large diamond ring on his fore- 
finger (presented to him a.d. 1818, in the condemned 
cell, Newgate, by Mr. Montmorency Fluke, the cele- 
brated forger, for whom he was concerned), and 
beaver hat, turned up just at the slightest angle of 
flection at the brim. c This is a man,' I used to say, 
with great respect, to myself, 'who can remember 
forty shilling arrests, thirty years' long Chancery 
suits, and Monday hanging mornings, with a dozen 
victims. The Fleet and the Rules of the Bench, the 
seventy Commissioners in Bankruptcy, and the Court 
of Pie Powder ; John Doe and Richard Roe, John 
a'Nokes and John a' Styles, sticks and staves, and 
justification of sham bail; — he has been familiar with 
all these mysteries now gone into irrevocable limbo.' 
And as I looked upon the little old lawyer I sighed ; 
for, alas ! he was very, very old, and came clown to 
the office more by habit and for peaceful recreation 
than anything else. The suing and selling-up is now 
done by his sons and partners, one of whom is six 
feet high, and as hirsute as Julia Pastrana, while the 



LITTLE OLD MEN. 255 

other is poetical and plays the flute. I have chambers 
in Drybones'-inn now, and have not as yet found one 
little old lawyer. 

There was much that was good about another 
little old man — the schoolmaster. It is true that, as 
an educational means, he thought a birch the very 
best thing in the world, and next to that a cane, and 
next to that a strap; but he was not without some 
capacity for teaching, and some faculty of under- 
standing, his boys; he struck, but he heard. Some 
modern preceptors are so much in the habit of talking 
about themselves, that it is with difficulty the scholar 
gets a word in. There is a charming figure of the lit- 
tle old schoolmaster, in as charming a picture by Mr. 
Mulready, in the Sheepshanks' Collection — a spare, 
pale, thoughtful pedagogue, severe you may be sure, 
but just, and willing to hear both sides. He has 
made his appearance at the close of a fiercely con- 
tested bout at fisticuffs, and is solemnly tweaking the 
boy who has been denounced by his schoolfellows as 
bully and aggressor in the fray, by the ear. That 
boy's defence, if he can make any, will be listened to, 
but I will wager that ere the sun goes down — and it 
is declining — he will be led off to the little old school- 
master's study and scourged. Now and then, in re- 
mote country places, you may still come upon the 
little old schoolmaster, in rusty black, and sometimes 
with a red nose, who officiates as parish clerk, sings 
a capital comic song, has written a satire upon the 
squire, and indites love-letters for the village maidens. 



256 UNDER THE SUN 

But he is rapidly ceding to the influence of the trained 
schoolmaster, with all kinds of uncomfortable certi- 
ficates, and the bloom of Privy Council patronage 
upon him. 

And the little old doctor. Ah! there is corn in 
Egypt. All is not barren. The diminutive veteran 
of medical science still flourishes. I am myself one 
of the most prejudiced of mankind, and I confess 
that I don't like my doctors when young or large. 
If the former, I ask querulously what they know 
about my stomach ? They are not old enough, to 
have a stomach, of their own. If the latter — if they 
run large, and are muscular and good-looking — I 
fancy they are too much occupied in boating, or 
cricketing, or spouting, or riding, or flirting, to devote 
the proper quota of time to study and experiment. I 
have known many doctors who were expert photo- 
graphers. In my captious way, I always contended 
they would have been much better employed in dis- 
secting frogs. We want a doctor to know all about 
the inside of things, not their exterior. May he not 
take a turn at his camera during his leisure time ? it 
may be asked. A doctor has no right to any leisure. 
When fatigued with study, let him seek out a brother 
medico and amicably converse upon the arrangement 
of nuclei, or the different processes of the central la- 
mella of the ethmoid bone. Let him descant upon 
frigorific mixtures or compound mercurial liniments. 
Had John Hunter any leisure ? Had Astley Cooper, 
had Abernethy, had Bichat, had Esquirol? Look at 



LITTLE OLD MEN. 257 

that wonderful Monsieur Majendie, who, in his odd 
moments, vivisected cats, dogs, and rabbits — pour se 
distraire. 

Again, large doctors make a noise in the sick-room, 
handle you roughly, and talk loud. Give me a little 
old man for a physician. I don't care if he be old 
enough to have killed my grandmother. I say, when 
I am sick, ' This withered bright-eyed little old Sage 
has brought hundreds of children into the world, has 
seen hundreds of strong men die, has saved hundreds 
of others who were in worse case than I. Let him 
work his will with me. He is not a fool. He must 
have seen much, learnt much, and must know more.' 
In matters of surgery I admit that I don't stand out 
for age and size. When amputation be unavoidable, 
the Colossus of Rhodes may as well cut off your leg 
as a pigmy. 

So great a change has come emphatically over 
the face of English society since the momentous 
question, ' Why shave ? ' was mooted some years 
since in Household Words, that very nearly all the 
ancient landmarks and types of outward character 
are as lost as the books of Livy. When I state that 
the porter of the Strand Union Workhouse in Lon- 
don wears a luxuriant beard, that pawnbrokers, rail- 
way guards, and linendrapers' assistants have burst 
out in moustaches, and that my bootmaker called 
upon me the other morning with a 'goatee,' the ex- 
tent to which abundant hairiness has changed the 
aspect of polite society will be readily understood. 



258 UNDER THE SUN 

Orson is everywhere, Valentine nowhere. Love levels 
ranks ; but beards give to modern English humanity 
as uniform a facial cast as maybe seen in that famous 
regiment of the Russian guards twelve hundred strong, 
all the privates of which have snub noses, and the 
field -officers alone are permitted to be nasally Roman. 
The little old gentlemen one meets in easy life have, 
as a rule, abandoned themselves to the beard mania, 
and to me are little old gentlemen no more. When 
I see grizzled beards wagging beneath their little noses 
and spectacles, my thoughts revert with anything but 
favourable impressions to the gardens of the Zoological 
Society, and the inmates of certain cages I have seen 
there. Upon my word, I saw a little old Reverend, 
Fellow of his College too, with a beard, but three 
weeks since. No wonder that Essays and Reviews 
run through so many editions, and that heterodoxy 
is rife in the land! 

By little old men I do not mean dwarfs. There is 
the usual number of those afflicted persons to be seen 
about; and an elderly dwarf is the usual merry 
sprightly mupical little fellow, or else the (nearly as 
usual) spiteful malevolent snapping and snarling little 
nuisance. No, no ; the little old men I seek and so 
rarely find are the dapper, symmetrical, clean-limbed 
personages who, for grinning and bowing, for smirking 
and simpering, for fetching ladies' cloaks and putting 
on their own goloshes, for slapping giants on the back 
even if they stand on tiptoe to do it, for poking people 
in the ribs, and seeing the hardest drinkers out at a 



LITTLE OLD MEN. 259 

carouse, were inimitable and unequalled. They were 
almost always valiant little men, too, choleric, peppery, 
tremendous fire-eaters, often lugging'about huge cases 
of duelling-pistols. How they snapped off the noses 
of tavern waiters ! How they put their arms akimbo 
and beat hackney-coachmen off their own ground 
bv slanging them down ! In argument'it was difficult 
to find a match for the little old men. It was no use 
taunting them with c the infirmities of age,' or call- 
ing them dotards and fogies. They weren't infirm; 
they didn't dote; they hadn't a touch of fogeyism 
about them. But where does one find the active, 
jaunty, sarcastic little old man nowadays? Large, 
limp, purse-mouthed old men fill the bow-windows of 
clubs, wheezing forth platitudes to other old men. 
Sad old boys maunder in drawing-rooms or grumble 
at dinner - tables. Dreary old peers, six feet bent 
double, rise from the back benches of their Lord- 
ships' House, and deny the fact of the sun having 
risen that morning. It would be libellous, perhaps, 
to hint that — well, our vestries — -are governed by 
knots of doddering old men ; but it is undeniable, I 
think, that many really clever little old men were 
formerly to be found in the Commons' House of Par- 
liament. Those that now remain are few, and are 
growing a feeble folk. 

Little old men seemed to have acquired their vi- 
vacity, as old port wine its crust and flavour, by long 
keeping and careful cellarage. There is, as a rule, 
nothing more remarkable in a little young man than 



260 UNDER THE SUN 

his conceit. As for little middle-aged men, they fre- 
quently keep their diminutive size a secret altogether. 
It is astonishing how many middle-aged men are not 
more than four foot nothing, and the world, even to 
the wives of their bosoms, are not in the least aware 
of the fact. Louis le Grand masqueraded it through 
life on high-heeled shoes and in a towering periwig; 
and it was only when he died that the undertaker first, 
and Europe afterwards, discovered that he was a little 
man. Voltaire, again, was not half so tall as he gave 
himself out, and the world supposed him to be. It 
is better, perhaps, that these things should be kept 
secrets of state, even from ourselves. It is not good 
to find out too much about great men — about man 
altogether it may be. Are we anything the better 
for the information imparted to us, with a diabolic 
sneer, by Swift, that 4 man is only a forked straddling 
animal with bandy legs' ? 

It is curious to contrast the images handed down 
to us of the illustrious dead who were of no great sta- 
ture, with what might have been their semblance had 
they become old. Alexander the Great, for all Apelles' 
flattery, was a little man. Imagine the conqueror of 
Darius as both little and old ! Or, more suggestive 
still, picture to yourself Napoleon the First, had he 
survived Sir Hudson Lowe — who, by the way, did 
live to be old, and of no great stature — as a little 
old man — brisk, alert, snuffy, and with a scratch 
wig! Not that little old kings and emperors have 
been, or are rarities. Sovereigns, as a rule, run 



LITTLE OLD MEN. 



small. No doubt continual preoccupation in devis- 
ing beneficial measures for their subjects dries theni 
up. They are so good that they lose flesh. The 
weight of a crown contracts their joints. The odour 
of incense — like the gin given to the poor little chil- 
dren of acrobats — stops their growth. Turn over the 
Almanack de Gotha, and interleave it with cartes-de- 
visite, and you will find the majority of European so- 
vereigns to be below the average size. That long 
Prince Oscar of Sweden was a phenomenon to rank 
in a museum by the side of the Emperor of Russia's 
colossal drum-major, and O'Brien the Irish giant. 
Besides, was not his Swedish highness' s grandfather 
Bernadotte the grenadier? 

The mention of continental potentates reminds me 
that France is to this clay the country of little old men. 
Still at the Cafe de Foy, and other good old pigtail 
establishments, where smoking is not permitted, and 
the poisonous absinthe emits no vapid odour — still in 
Luxembourg and Tuileries gardens ; in salons of the 
Faubourg St. Germain; in cabinets de lecture hard 
by the Odeon, do you meet the little old Frenchman, 
with his cheerful dried chimpanzee face, his thatch of 
white stubble, his snowy neckerchief, the red ribbon 
at his button-hole, and the never-failing snuff-box in 
his hand, ready to be offered to all acquaintances. 
In his youth he was a Merveilleux, a Muscadin, an 
Incroyable. He remembers the first Empire, the two 
Restorations, the Hundred Days. He was a page to 
the Reine Hortense, perhaps ; an officer in Charles the 



262 UNDER THE SUN 

Tenth's Royal Guards probably. He ceased to trouble 
himself with politics after the 27th of July 1830. At 
the monarchies, republics, and empires which have 
succeeded that^convulsion, he shrugs his little shoul- 
ders with philosophic indifference. ' C'est comme 9a/ 
he says. He speaks of all the kings, dictators, mar- 
shals, ministers since 1830, as ' ces Messieurs!' Let 
us lift the hat to this little old Frenchman with his 
weazen countenance and thin legs, his agile courteous 
ways. Pie, too, is fading out. A little old Frenchman 
of the stock once gravely accounted to me for the un- 
deniable ugliness and boorishness of the modern Pa- 
risian or c Mossoo,' by asserting that he was the un- 
conscious offspring of the Cossacks who formed part 
of the army of occupation in 1815. It is a wise child 
that knows his own father. Be it as it may, it is in- 
dubitable that the graceful and polite little old French- 
man — perfectly well known in English society forty 
years ago as the emigrant chevalier who taught danc- 
ing and the languages in ladies' boarding-schools, 
who was as gallant as Dunois, and as chivalrous as 
Bayard, and lived contentedly on twopence-halfpenny 
a day, is on the wane. 

Your little old men abroad live, when they are to 
be found extant at all, to a prodigious age. They seem 
to be subject to the same mummifying influences as 
the bodies of the old monks in Sicily. They grow 
very yellow, very withered, their bones seem to crack 
as they walk, but they don't die. Take my friend Es- 
tremadura, for instance. I have known Seilor Ramon 



LITTLE OLD MEN. 263 



de Estremadura ever since I can remember the know- 
ledge of anything. That Hidalgo knew my papa, and 
lie has been dead nearly forty years. Estremadura 
was so old when I was a child, that the nurses used to 
frighten me with him. I have met him, off and on, 
in almost every capital in Europe. Only this summer, 
drinking tea with certain friends, there came a brisk 
though tremulous little double knock at the door. 
'Ecoutez,' cried the lady of the house; 'that surely is 
Estremadura's knock.' Estremadura ! There was a cry 
of derisive amazement. Everybody agreed that he had 
been dead ten years. Somebody had seen an account 
of his funeral in the newspapers. But the door opened, 
and Estremadura made his appearance. He was the 
same as ever. The same yellow face, black bead-like 
eyes, innumerable wrinkles, fixed grin: the same 
straw hat, grass-green coat, white trousers, and big 
stick — his unvarying costume ever since I had known 
him. ' How do you do?' was his salutation to me. 
' Ver well since I saw you lasse?' I had not seen him 
for fifteen years. He chatted and talked, and drank 
tea. He was asked whence he had come ? Erom Rome. 
"VVhither he was going ? To Stockholm. He was charm- 
ing ; yet we could not help feeling, all of us, as though 
we were sitting in the presence of a facetious phan- 
tom, of a jocular ghost. It was rather a relief when 
he skipped away, and was seen no more. I wonder 
whether he will ever turn up again. It is clear that 
Estremadura is ninety, if he be a day old ; yet I dare- 
say he will read the account of my death, if anybody 



264 UNDER THE SUN 

takes the trouble to advertise that fact in the news- 
papers, and say, ' Aha! and so he die. Eh ! I knew his 
good papa ver well.' 

Surely we should be careful in keeping up the 
breed of little old men at home as well as abroad. 
To me they are infinitely more agreeable than big 
men, young or old. But they are dwindling away, 
they are vanishing fast. The little old ticket-porters, 
with their white aprons, are being superseded by burly 
middle-aged messengers, or else by bearded commis- 
sionnaires. Artists get into the Academy before they 
are forty ; and the little old painter who remembers 
Northcote, and to whom the Princess Amelia sat for 
her portrait, is a rara avis. Among the City com- 
panies you sometimes light upon wardens and mem- 
bers of the court of assistants, who are little old men 
of the true stamp. But their numbers are waxing 
small, and it must be written of them, c Here lie.' 

I own there is one class of little old men whom I 
could well spare from the stage of existence. I mean 
the half-palsied, shrivelled, wobegone little gray ato- 
mies in blue smocks and corduroy shorts, and ribbed 
stockings on their shrunken shanks, whom the metro- 
politan boards of guardians send out to sweep the 
streets. They are always in imminent danger of being 
run over. They always sweep the refuse the wrong 
way. It is terrible to look at their poor old faces and 
bleary eyes, full of drowsy woe, blank misery, inane 
despair. * No Hope, and there never has been any 
these seventy years;' these words seem legibly in- 



LITTLE OLD MEN. 265 

scribed on the bands round their oilskin hats. These 
little old men are a fear and a wonder to me, and 
in decency and mercy I think they should not be al- 
lowed to drift about in the great river of London 
street life. 



NOBODY ABEOAD. 

Yeey early in this present century, that is to say, 
in the month of October 1801, it occurred to Mr. 
Nobody to visit the famous city of Paris. Accord- 
ing to the Republican calendar, which then obtained 
among our neighbours, the month was not October, 
and the year was not 1801. The month was Bru- 
maire, and the year was Ten of the Republic one and 
indivisible. But Mr. Nobody behig an Englishman, 
the non-republican computation of time and season 
may be adopted. I call my traveller Mr. Nobody 
because I have not the slightest idea who he was, 
whence he came, or whither — when he returned from 
his Parisian tour — he went. He was certainly not 
Tom Paine, but I am not prepared to assert that he 
might not ha^e been the author of Junius, taking 
a shady and secretive holiday, according to his in- 
scrutable wont. He wrote a book about his travels, 
entitled A Bough Sketch of Modern Paris, and he 
caused it to be published anonymously, in a thin 
octavo, by a bookseller in St. Paul's-churchyard. He 
did not even favour the public with his initials, or 
with three asterisks, or with a Greek or Roman 
pseudonym. At the end of four pages of preface 



NOBODY ABROAD. 267 

he signs himself ' The Author,' which, in default of 
any other explanation, is, to say the least, baffling. 
To increase the bewilderment of posterity, the work 
of this occult traveller takes the form of a series of 
letters, addressed to a friend, who is qualified as 
'My Dear Sir;' but who 'My Dear Sir' was is un- 
known to Everybody — except Nobody. At the con- 
clusion of each of his letters Mr. Nobody observes, 
6 As soon as I have anything to communicate, I shall 
write again. In the mean time I take my leave, and 
am, (fee' What are you to do with an author who 
persists in saying that he is et cetera ? 

Mr. Nobody, however, is not to be neglected, for 
two reasons: the first, that he has drawn a very 
curious and interesting picture of Paris, as it ap- 
peared to an Englishman during the brief peace, or 
rather truce, of Amiens ; the second that, his obstinate 
anonymity notwithstanding, Mr. Nobody's pages are 
fruitful of internal evidence that he must have been 
Somebody, and somebody of note, too. He had a 
wife who shared his pleasures and his hardships. He 
was on visiting terms with his Britannic Majesty's 
ambassador in Paris, and was presented at the Tuil- 
eries. Mrs. Nobody even dined there. Finally, he 
took his own carriage abroad with him, and his letters 
of credit on his bankers were illimitable. 

On the twenty-sixth of October he left the York 
House at Dover, and embarked on board a neutral 
vessel, which he was compelled to hire, no English 
packet-boat being yet permitted to enter a French 



268 UNDER THE SUN 

port. After a smooth and pleasant passage of four 
hours, Mr. Nobody found himself at Calais. As soon 
as the vessel entered the port, two Custom-house 
officers in military uniform came on board, and took 
down the names of the passengers. One of them 
retired, to make his report to the municipality of 
Calais, while the other remained on board to prevent 
any of the passengers from landing. While the 
French douanier was on shore, Calais pier was 
crowded by spectators, the greater part of whom 
were military men. They seemed to derive great 
gratification from staring at the English ladies, and 
from examining the body of Mr. Nobody's carriage, 
which was hung on the deck of the ship ; while Mr. 
N. himself was equally entertained with the great 
moustaches — the italics are his own — of the grena- 
diers, the wooden shoes of the peasants, and the close 
caps of the grisettes. 

The douanier returning on board, Mr. Nobody 
and suite were permitted to touch the territory of 
the republic, and, escorted by a guard of bourgeois, 
desperately ragged as to uniform, were marched from 
the quay to the Custom-house, from the Custom-house 
to the mayor, and from the mayor to the Commissary 
of Police. At each of these offices, examinations- 
oral, impedimental, and personal — were made. Mr. 
Nobody was fain not only to surrender his passport, 
but also his pocket-book and letters. The last-named 
were returned on the following day. These little 
police amenities coming to an end about seven p.m.. 



NOBODY ABROAD. 269 

Mr. Nobody was then free to sit down to an excellent 
dinner at the celebrated hotel formerly kept by Des- 
sein, now succeeded by his nephew Quillacq — a very 
respectable man, who met Mr. N. at landing, and, 
with the utmost civility and attention, took care of 
his carriage and baggage. The Unknown wished to 
set out on the following morning for Paris, but, 
according to respectable M. Quillacq, that was a 
simple impossibility ; for, although the Unmentioned 
had brought with him a passport in due form from 
M. de Talleyrand, countersigned by M. Otto, the 
French minister in London, and backed by his Bri- 
tannic Majesty's own gracious license to travel in 
foreign parts, it was necessary to have all these 
documents exchanged for a laissez-passer from the 
mayor of Paris. 

Mr. N. accordingly passed the whole of the next 
day in Calais, and on Wednesday morning, accom- 
panied by 'Mrs. ,' he left Calais, with post-horses. 

Why won't he call her his Araminta, or his Sophon- 
isba? Betsy Jane, even, would be preferable to this 

colourless c Mrs. : The roads were very bad, 

particularly near Boulogne ; the posting charges were 
moderate — six livres, or five shillings, a stage of five 
miles ; say a shilling a mile. How much is first-class 
fare by the Great Northern of France? About 
twopence-halfpenny. 

Montreuil, where the travellers were to sleep, was 
not reached until sunset. Here was found excellent 
accommodation l at the inn celebrated by Sterne.' 



270 UNDER THE SUN 

The Reverend Mr. Yorick seems to have been the 
Murray of the eighteenth century and the beginning 
of the present one, and it is astonishing that his 
publishers did not put forth an advertising edition 
of the Sentimental Journey. At Montreuil, Mr. N. 
(the rogue!), in true Yorick-like spirit, noticed c the 
smiling attention of two very pretty girls who acted 

as waiters.' He omits to state whether Mrs. 

noticed their smiling attention. The next day, 
through a fine country and bad roads, Amiens was 
reached. The cultivation by the wayside was good ; 
the peasants were well clad ; the beggars were numer- 
ous. The waiters, postboys, and landlords were 
everywhere remarkably civil, and expressed their 
joy at seeing c Milords Anglais' once more among 
them. Can Mr. Nobody have been a Nobleman, and 

Mrs. only a shallow delusion veiling an actual 

Ladyship? His Lordship — I mean his Nonentity — 
remarked that the lower classes were more respectful 
than before the revolution. The reason appeared to 
him obvious. The old nobility treated their inferiors 
w r ith jocular familiarity — the familiarity which, it 
may be, bordered on contempt — and the inferiors, 
mere thralls and bondsmen as they were, took trif- 
ling verbal liberties with their lords. Did not some- 
thing akin to this prevail in Scotland during the last 
century, and is it not very well illustrated in Dean 
Ramsay's story of the Scotch lord who picks up a 
farthing in the sight of a beggar? 'Earl!' cries out 
the gaberlunzie man, c gie us the siller.' ' Na, na,' 



NO BOD Y ABROAD . 27 r 

replies his lordship, pocketing the coin, i fin' a baubee 
for yoursel', puir bodie.' When the social gulf be- 
tween classes is unfathomable, do we not sometimes 
affect to shake hands across it? But when we stand 
foot to foot — £ mensch zu mensch,' as Schiller has it 
— on the same earth, do we not often feel inclined to 
shake our fists in each other's faces? ' The loss of 
their rank,' observes Mr. Nobody, £ has compelled the 
higher classes to command respect by a distance of 
manner, which has, of course, produced a similar 
course of conduct in the persons beneath them.' But 
for that merciless date — 1801 — one would think 
that Mr. JSTobody had travelled in the State of Vir- 
ginia since the abolition of slavery. The planters are 
no longer hail fellow well met with their serfs, and 
enfranchised Sambo no longer addresses the white 
man as ' Mas'r,' but as ' Sa.' Liberty is a wonderful 
teacher of etiquette. 

At Amiens the Unknown drove to the Hotel 
dAngleterre, where he was magnificently and miser- 
ably lodged. The windows and doors declined to 
keep out the wind and rain ; the fires were bad, and 
the supper was worse; nor was the final touch of 
extravagant charges wanting. The journey was re- 
sumed on Friday morning ; the beauty of the country 
and the badness of the roads increasing at every step. 
At length the weary travellers clattered into Chan- 
tilly, found a comfortable bed, and, on Saturday 
morning, visited the ' magnificent ruins' of the Palace 
of Chantilly. The superb edifice of the stables only 



272 UNDER THE SUN. 



remained intact. The government of the First Con- 
sul had forbidden the sale of these buildings, and the 
mistress of the inn told Mr. Nobody, with tears in 
her eyes, that had Napoleon been at the head of 
affairs only six months sooner, the palace also would 
have been rescued from destruction. 

A little way out of Chantilly, a fine paved road 
commenced, extending to Paris, which city Mr. No- 
body reached at two p.m. on Saturday. He had been 
three and a half days and three nights on the road. 
At the Paris barrier, passports were asked for, but 
were at once and civilly returned. ' Carriages,' Mr. 
N. adds, ' are no longer stopped, as formerly, in every 
town, to be searched for contraband goods ; but turn- 
pikes are numerous and expensive/ On entering 
Paris, the travellers drove to several hotels before 
they could procure accommodation, and such as they 
at last found was wretched. Many of the hotels had 
been stripped during the revolution, and had not 
been refurnished; and the few remaining in proper 
gear were crowded by foreigners, who, since the peace, 
had flocked hither in vast numbers from every country 
in the world. Mr. Nobody very strongly advises per- 
sons intending to visit Paris to write some days be- 
forehand to their correspondents, if they desire to 
be comfortably lodged on their arrival. The Mys- 
terious Man was not, however, disheartened by the 
badness of the inn. So soon as he had changed his 
attire, he hastened to call on M. Perregaux, his 
banker, who, notwithstanding his recent promotion 



NOBOD Y ABROAD. 273 

to the rank of senator, was as civil and obliging as 
ever. Mr. Nobody must have been Somebody. See 
how civil everybody was to him ! 

I have been an unconscionable time bringing this 
shadowy friend of mine from Calais to Paris ; but I 
hold this record of his experiences to be somewhat 
of the nature of a Text, on which a lay sermon might 
be preached to the great edification of modern, fret- 
ful, and grumbling travellers. l Young sir,' I would 
say, were it my business to preach, the which, happily, 
it is not, c modern young British tourist, take account 
of the four days' sufferings of Mr. Nobody and Mrs. 
Dash, and learn patience and contentment. Some 
eighty hours did they pass in hideous discomfort, on 
dolorous roads, or in unseemly hostelries. Much 
were they baited anent passports: much were they 
exercised in consequence of the stiff-neckedness of 
that proud man the mayor of Calais. How many 
times, for aught we know, may not their linchpins 
have disappeared, their traces snapped, their axles 
parted? Who shall say but that their postillions, 
although civil, smelt fearfully of garlic, and (especi- 
ally during the stages between Beauvais and St. 
Denis) became partially overcome by brandy? St. 
Denis has always been notorious for the worst brandy 
in Europe. And the dust! And the beggars! But 
for the " smiling attentions" of those two pretty waiter 
girls at Montreuil, I tremble to think upon what might 
have been the temper of Mr. Nobody when he found 
himself, at last, in Paris. Thus he of 1801. This 

T 



274 UNDER THE SUN. 



is how your grandpapa, your uncle William, went to 
Paris ; but how fares it with you, my young friend ? 
You designed, say on Friday afternoon last, to take 
three days' holiday. You would have a " run over 
to Paris," you said. You dined at six p.m. on Friday 
at the Junior Juvenal Club, Pall-mall. You smoked 
your habitual cigar; you played your usual game of 
billiards after dinner. It was many minutes after 
eight when you found yourself, with a single dressing- 
bag, for luggage, at Charing-cross Terminus. You 
took a "first-class return" for Paris; for which you 
paid, probably, much less than Mr. Nobody disbursed 
for the passage of himself and his high -hung carriage 
(to say nothing of Mrs. Dash) from Dover to Calais. 
A couple of hours of the express train's fury brought 
you, that Friday night, to Dover — brought you to 
the Admiralty pier, to the very verge and brink of 
the much -sounding sea, and bundling you, so to 
speak, down some slippery steps, sent you staggering 
on board a taut little steamer, which, having gorged 
certain mail-bags, proceeded to fight her way through 
the biggest waves. In two hours afterwards you were 
at Calais. No passports, no botheration with muni- 
cipalities, commissaires, or stiff-necked mayors awaited 
you. Another express train waited for you, giving 
you time to dispatch a comfortable supper ; and by 
seven o'clock on Saturday morning you were in Paris. 
You went to the Porte St. Martin on Saturday night, 
and to Mabille afterwards. On Sunday I hope you 
went to church, and perhaps you went to Versailles. 



NO BOD Y ABROAD. 275 

On Monday you had a good deal of boulevard shop- 
ping to get through, for your sisters, or for the Mrs. 
Dash of the future; and, after a comfortable five 
o'clock dinner at the Cafe Eiche in the afternoon, 
you found yourself shortly after seven p.m. at the 
Chemin de Fer du Nord, and, by six o'clock on 
Tuesday morning, you were back again at Charing- 
cross or at Victoria. Arrived there, you had yet a 
florin and a fifty centime piece left of the change for 
a ten-pound note. And yet you murmur and grumble. 
You have spoken heresy against the harbour-master 
of Dover. You have hurled bitter words at the di- 
rectors of the South-Eastern Eailway Company, and 
have made mock of the London, Chatham, and Dover. 
Thrice have you threatened to write to the Times. 
Once did you propose to " punch" the hoad of an ob- 
noxious waiter at the Calais buffet.' To this purport 
I could say a great deal if I preached sermons. 

My esteemed friend Mr. Nobody abode in Paris 
for full six months ; but the amount of sight- seeing 
he went through was so vast, and his account thereof 
is so minute, that, for reasons of space, I do not dare 
to follow him from each Parisian pillar to its corre- 
sponding post. I can only briefly note that he at- 
tended a sitting of the legislative body in the ci-devant 
Palais Bourbon, and that he paid five francs for 
admission to the gallery. Drums and fifes announced 
the approach of the legislators, and a guard of hon- 
our, consisting of an entire regiment, escorted them. 
The president having taken the chair, more drums 



276 UNDER THE SUN. 



and fifes proclaimed the arrival of three counsellors 
of state, bearing a message from the government. 
These high republican functionaries were preceded 
by ushers wearing Spanish hats with tricoloured 
plumes; the counsellors themselves were dressed in 
scarlet cloth, richly embroidered. They ascended 
the tribune, read their message, and made three sepa- 
rate speeches on the subject of honour, glory, and 
France; whereafter the legislative body, with loud 
cries of 'Vive le Premier Consul!' c Yive Madame 
Bonaparte!' separated. It was the last day of the 
session. Abating the scarlet coats and the Spanish 
hats of the huissiers, the break up of a parliamentary 
session in 1801 must have very closely resembled 
that which we see in the French Corps Legislatif, in 
1869. Mr. Nobody went away much pleased, espe- 
cially with the admiration bestowed by his neigh- 
bours in the gallery on Lord Cornwallis, who was 
present among the corps diplomatique, and for whom 
Mr. Nobody seems himself to have entertained an 
affection bordering on adoration. 'Yes, yes,' cried an 
enthusiastic republican near him, 'that tall man is 
Milord Cornwallis. He has a fine figure. He looks 
like a military man. He has served in the army. Is 
it not true, sir? Look at that little man near him. 
What a difference ! What a mean appearance !' 

Mr. Nobody was in one aspect an exceptional 
Englishman. He appears to have been imbued with 
a sincere admiration for the talents of Napoleon 
Bonaparte, and even to have had some liking for the 



NOBOD Y ABROAD. 277 

personal character of that individual. ' My dear sir/ 
he writes to that Nameless friend of his on the sixth 
of December, ' my curiosity is at length gratified. I 
have seen Bonaparte. You will readily conceive 
how much pleasure I felt to-day in beholding, for the 
first time, this extraordinary man, on whose exer- 
tions the fate of France, and in many respects that of 
Europe, may be said to depend.' Mr. N. was fortu- 
nate enough to obtain places in the apartments of 
Duroc, governor of the Tuileries, from which he wit- 
nessed a review in the Carrousel. The Consular, 
soon to become the Imperial, Guard were inspected 
by the Master of France, then in the thirty-third 
year of his age. He was mounted on a white charger. 
As he passed several times before Mr. Nobody's 
window, that Impalpability had ample leisure to ob- 
serve him ; and it appears to me that the portrait he 
has drawn of the First Consul, then in the full flush 
of his fame, undarkened by D'Enghien's murder, 
Pichegru's imputed end, and Josephine's divorce, is 
sufficient to rescue Mr. Nobody's notes from oblivion. 
' His complexion,' writes the Unknown, £ is remark- 
ably sallow: his countenance expressive, but stern; 
his figure lithe, but well made ; and his whole person, 
like the mind which it contains, singular and remark- 
able. If I were compelled to compare him to any 
one, I should name Kemble the actor. Though 
Bonaparte is less in size, and less handsome than that 
respectable performer, yet, in the construction of the 
features and the general expression, there is a strong 



278 UNDER THE SUN 



resemblance. The picture of Bonaparte at the re- 
view, exhibited some time back in Piccadilly,* and 
the bust in Sevres china, which is very common in 
Paris, and has probably become equally so in Lon- 
don' (it was soon to be superseded by Gillray's mon- 
strous caricatures of the Corsican Ogre), 'are the 
best likenesses I have seen. As to his dress, he wore 
the grand costume of his office, that is to say, a scar- 
let velvet coat, profusely embroidered with gold. To 
this he had added leather breeches, jockey boots, and 
a little plain cocked-hat, the only ornament to which 
was a national cockade. His hair, unpowdered, was 
cut close to his neck.' Now this (excuse the an- 
achronism) is a perfect photograph, and might serve 
as a guide to any English artist desirous of emulating, 
as a Napoleographer, the achievements of Meisson- 
nier or Gerome. We have had, from English pain- 
ters, Napoleon in blue, in green, in a gray greatcoat, 
in his purple coronation robes, even in the striped 
nankeen suit of his exile on the Rock. But the great 
enemy of England in scarlet ! the vanquished of 
"Waterloo in a red coat ! But for Mr. Nobody's testi- 
mony I should just as soon have imagined George 
the Third with a Phrygian cap over his wig, or the 
Right Honourable William Pitt weathering the storm 
as a sans culotte. 



* This picture was by Carle Vernet, the father of Horace, and was 
exhibited at Fores's — ancestor of the present well-known print-seller. 
At Fores's, jnst eight years previously, had been on view an engraving 
of the execution of Louis the Sixteenth, by Isaac Cruikshank (father of 
our George), and a ' working model' of the guillotine. 



NO BOD Y ABROAD. 2 7 9 

Again did Mr. Nobody see the Corsican, and at 
his own house — in the audience hall of the Tuile- 
ries. Mr. Jackson was minister plenipotentiary from 
England prior to Lord Whitworth's coming ; and to 
Mr. Jackson did Mr. Nobody apply to obtain pre- 
sentation at the court of the First Consul. His name 
— wliat was his name? — being accordingly sent in 
to Citizen Talleyrand, three years afterwards to be 
Prince of Bene ventum, minister of foreign affairs, Mr. 
N. drove to the Tuileries at three o'clock in the after- 
noon, and was ushered into a small apartment on the 
ground-floor, called the Saloon of the Ambassadors, 
where the foreign ministers and their respective 
countrymen waited until Napoleon was ready to 
receive them. Chocolate, sherbert, and liqueurs in 
abundance having been handed around- -a hint for 
St. James's Palace — the doors, after an hour's in- 
terval, were thrown open, and the guests ascended 
the grand staircase, which was lined by grenadiers 
with their arms grounded. Passing through four or 
five rooms, in each of which was an officer's guard, 
who saluted the strangers, the cortege came into the 
presence chamber. Here stood Bonaparte, between 
Cambaceres, the second, and Lebrun, the third con- 
sul. The triumvirs were all in full fig of scarlet vel- 
vet and gold. The generals, senators, and counsellors 
of state who surrounded Napoleon made way for the 
foreigners, and a circle was immediately formed, the 
nationalities ranging themselves behind their proper 
ministers. The Austrian ambassador stood on the 



2 8o UNDER THE SUN 

right of the First Consul ; next to him Mr. Jackson ; 
then Count Lucchesini, the Prussian minister; and 
next to him the Hereditary Prince of Orange, who 
was to be presented that day, and who was not to 
meet Napoleon again until Waterloo. In compliment 
to the Dutch prince, Napoleon, contrary to his prac- 
tice, began the audience on his side the circle. He 
spoke some time to the son of the deposed Stadtholder, 
and seemed anxious to make his awkward and extra- 
ordinary situation as little painful to him as possible. 
According to Mr. Nobody, the Napoleonic blandish- 
ments were lost on his Batavian highness, who was 
sulky and silent. In passing each foreign minister, 
the First Consul received the individuals of each re- 
spective nation with the greatest ease and dignity. 
Where had he learnt all this ease and dignity, this 
young soldier of thirty-two? From the goatherds of 
Corsica? From the snuffy old priests who were his 
tutors at Brienne? From the bombardiers at Tou- 
lon? In the camps of Italy? From the Sphinx in 
Egypt? From Talma the actor, who, when the con- 
queror was poor, had often given him the dinner he 
lacked? When it came to Mr. Jackson's turn, six- 
teen English were presented. After he had spoken 
to five or six of their number, Napoleon remarked, 
4 with a smile which is peculiarly his own, and which 
changes a countenance usually stern into one of great 
mildness: "I am delighted to see here so many Eng- 
lish. I hope our union may be of long continuance. 
We are the two most powerful and most civilised 



NOB OB Y ABROAD. 



nations in Europe. We should unite to cultivate the 
arts, and sciences, and letters; in short, to improve 
the happiness of human nature." ' In about two 
years after this interview, Englishmen and French- 
men were cultivating the arts and sciences, and doing 
their best to improve the happiness of human nature, 
by cutting each other's throats in very considerable 
numbers. Did Napoleon really mean what he said? 
Was he really anxious to be our friend, if we would 
only let him ? Or was he then, and all times, a Pro- 
digious Humbug? 

Mrs. Dash was to have her share in the hospitali- 
ties of the Tuileries. Returning home from viewing 
the sights one afternoon at half-past four o'clock, Mr. 
N. found a messenger who was the bearer of an invi- 
tation to Mrs. Dash, asking her to dinner that very 
day at five. The lady dressed in haste, and drove to 
the palace. She returned enraptured. The enter- 
tainment was elegant; the sight superb. More than 
two hundred persons sat down to dinner in a splendid 
apartment, The company consisted, besides Napo- 
leon's family, of the ministers, the ambassadors, 
several generals, senators, and other constituted au- 
thorities. There were only fifteen ladies present. 
All the English ladies who had been presented to 
Madame Bonaparte were asked; but only two of 
their number remained in Paris. The dinner was 
served entirely on gold and silver plate, and Sevres 
china : the latter bearing the letter B on every dish ; 
the central plateau was covered with moss, out of 



282 UNDER THE SUN 



which arose innumerable natural flowers, the odour 
of which perfumed the whole room. The First Con- 
sul and Madame Bonaparte conversed very affably 
with those around them. The servants were nu- 
merous, splendidly dressed, and highly attentive, and 
the dinner lasted more than two hours. Seven years 
ago, the lord of this sumptuous feast had been glad 
to pick up the crumbs from an actor's table, and 
vegetated in a garret in Paris, had haunted the ante- 
chambers of the War Minister in vain, had revolved 
plans of offering his sword to the Grand Turk if he 
could only procure a new pair of boots wherein to 
make his voyage to Constantinople. the ups and 
downs of fortune ! The First Consul was fated to in- 
vite few more Englishmen to dinner. But he was 
doomed to dine with us, not as a host, but as an un- 
willing guest. I can picture him in the cabin of the 
Northumberland, rising wearily from heavy joints 
to avoid heavier drinking, and the admiral and his 
officers scowling at him because he wouldn't stop and 
take t'other bottle. ■ ' The General,' pointedly re- 
marked Sir George Cockburn, once when his captive 
rose from table, and fled from port and sherry, ' has 
evidently not studied politeness in the school of Lord 
Chesterfield.' The poor temperate Italian, to whose 
pale cheek a single glass of champagne would bring a 
flush! Yet Mr. Nobody thought him dignity and 
politeness itself; and my private opinion is that Mr. 
Nobody knew what was what. 



SHOCKING ! 

The other day, being at Seville, at the inn dinner of 
the Fonda de Paris, I saw an English lady thrown 
into great perturbation by the conduct of a French- 
man, her neighbour, who having finished his plate of 
soup, and the puchero being somewhat tardy in mak- 
ing its ajDpearance, drew forth a leathern case and a 
box of wax matches, and, having bitten the end off a 
very big and bad cigar, proceeded to light and smoke 
it. I do not think a Spaniard of any class, to the 
lowest, would have done this thing. Although smok- 
ing is common enough at Spanish dinner-tables, when 
only men or natives are present, the innate good 
breeding of a cabalero would at once cause him to 
respect the presence of a lady and a stranger ; and he 
would as soon think of kindling, unbidden, a weed 
before her, as of omitting to cast himself (metaphori- 
cally) at her feet when he took his leave. Moreover, 
the Frenchman was wrong even in his manner of 
smoking. To consume a cigar at meal-times is not 
even un costumbre del pais — a custom of the coun- 
try. It is, the rather, a stupid solecism. Be- 
tween soup and puchero, or fish and roast, you 
may just venture on a cigarito — a dainty roll of to- 
bacco and tissue paper. Any other form of fumiga- 



284 UNDER THE SUN 



tion, ere the repast be over, is ill mannered. The 
Gaul, however, thought, no doubt, that to puff at one 
of the hideous lettuce-leaf sausages of the Regio Im- 
periale at dinner-time was precisely the thing to do in 
Spain. He smoked at Seville, just as on a hot day, 
in an English coffee-room, he would have ordered 
turtle-soup, a beefsteak 'well bleeding,' and a pot of 
porter-beer. I only wonder that he did not come 
down to dinner at the Fonda de Paris in full bull- 
fighter's costume — green satin breeches, pink silk 
stockings, and his hair in a net, or strumming a 
guitar, or clacking a pair of castanets. Indeed, he 
grinned complacently as he pulled at the abominable 
brand, and looked round ih^ table, as though for ap- 
proval. The Spaniards preserved a very grave as- 
pect; and Don Sandero M'Gillicuddy, late of Buenos 
Ayres, my neighbour, whispered to me that he 
thought the Frenchman 'vara rude.' As for the 
English lad}^, she was furious. She gathered up her 
skirts, grated away her chair, turned her left scapula 
full on the offending Frenchman, and I have no doubt 
wrote by the next post to Mr. John Murray of Albe- 
marle-street, indignantly to ask why English readers 
of the Handbook were not warned against the preva- 
lence of this atrocious practice at Spanish dinner- 
tables. In fact, she did everything but quit the hos- 
pitable board. In remaining, she showed wisdom ; for 
Spain is not a country where you can afford to trifle 
with your meals. You had best gather your rose- 
buds while you may, and help yourself to the puchero 



SHOCKING! 285 



whenever you have a chance. Ages may pass ere 
you get anything to eat again. 

The Frenchman was not abashed by this palpable 
expression of distaste on the part ' of his fair neigh- 
bour. I had an over-the-way acquaintance with him, 
and, glancing in my direction, he simply gave a de- 
precatory shrug, and murmured, 'Ah! c'est comme 
9a.' Shocking! It never entered the honest fellow's 
head that he had been wanting in courtesy to the 
entire company, but he jumped at the conclusion that 
the demoiselle Anglaise was a faultless monster of 
prudery, and that the inhalation of tobacco-smoke at 
dinner-time, the employment of a fork as a toothpick, 
the exhibition of ten thousand photographed ' legs of 
the ballet' in the shop windows, and frequent refer- 
ence to the anonymous or Bois de Boulogne world in 
conversation, were, to her and her sex and nation 
generally, things abhorrent, criminal, and ' shocking/ 

The French, who never get hold of an apt notion 
or a true expression without wearing it threadbare 
and worrying it to death, and have even traditional 
jests against this country, which are transmitted from 
caricaturist to caricaturist, and from father to son, 
have built up the ' faultless monster' to which I al- 
luded above, and persist in believing that it is the 
ordinary type of the travelling Englishwoman. Oddly 
enough, while their ladies — and all other continental 
ladies — have borrowed from ours the quaint and be- 
coming hat, the coloured petticoats and stockings, 
and the high-heeled boots which of late years have 



286 UNDER THE SUN. 

made feminine juvenility so coquettish and so fasci- 
nating, no French draughtsman, no French word- 
painter, ever depicts the English young lady save as 
a tall, rigid, and angular female — comely of face if you 
will, but standing bolt upright as a lifeguardsman, 
with her arms pendent, and her eyes demurely cast 
down. She always wears a straw bonnet of the coal- 
scuttle form, or an enormous flap hat with a green 
veil. Her hands, incased in beaver gloves, and her 
feet, which are in sandalled shoes, are very large. 
She usually carries a capacious reticule in variegated 
straw, of a bold chessboard pattern. She seldom 
wears any crinoline, and her hair is arranged in long 
ringlets most deliciously drooping. She seldom opens 
her mouth but to ejaculate i Shocking !' It is abso- 
lutely astounding to find so accurate an observer and 
so graphic a narrator as Monsieur Theophile Gautier 
falling into this dull and false conventionalism in his 
charming book on Spain. He is describing Gibraltar, 
and is very particular in the portrayal of such a Mees 
Anglaise as I have sketched above. The fidelity of 
the portrait will of course be fully appreciated by all 
British officers who have mounted guard over the 
Pillars of Hercules. The ladies of the garrison at 
Gibraltar are not, it is true, so numerous as they 
might be. Calpe is not a popular station with mili- 
tary females. There is no native society beyond the 
families of the l Rock scorpions,' who are usually 
dealers in mixed pickles and Allsopp's pale ale, and a 
few Spaniards who earn a remunerative but immoral 



SHOCKING! 287 



livelihood by coining bad dollars and smuggling 
Manchester cottons and Bremen cigars through San 
Roque; and unfortunately, to ladies of a theological 
turn, one of the chief charms of a sojourn in a foreign 
garrison is here lacking. There is nobody to convert 
in Gibraltar but the Jews; and as it takes about a 
thousand pounds sterling to turn a Hebrew into a 
Christian — and a very indifferent Christian at that, 
for you have to set him up in business and provide 
for his relations to the third and fourth generation — ■ 
missionary enterprise, to say the least, languishes. 
With all these drawbacks, I am told that English fe- 
male society at the Rock is charming ; that their cos- 
tume, their features, and their manners are alike 
sprightly and vivacious, and that the i girls of Gib,' 
as regards that rapidity and entrain which are so 
pleasingly characteristic of modern life, are only 
second to the far-famed merry maidens of Montreal, 
whose scarlet knickerbockers and twinkling feet, dis- 
porting on the glassy surface of the Victoria i Rink, 
have led captive so many old British grenadiers. 
When a maiden of Montreal is unusually rapid — what 
is termed ' fast' in this country — they say she is c two 
forty on a plank road,' two minutes and forty seconds 
being the time in which a Canadian trotter will be 
backed to get over a mile of deal-boarded track. 

Now, whatever could Monsieur Gautier have been 
thinking of so to libel the ladies of Gibraltar ? They 
slow ! They angular ! They ' avec la dimarche d'un 
grenadier' ! They addicted to the national ejaculation 



UNDER THE SUN 



of ' Shocking !' That old oak, however, of prejudice 
is so very firmly rooted, that generations, perhaps, 
will pass away ere foreigners begin to perceive that 
the stiff, reserved, puritanical Englishman or English- 
woman, if they still indeed exist, and travel on the 
Continent, have for sons and daughters ingenious 
youths, who in volatile vivacity are not disposed to 
yield the palm to young France, and gaily- attired 
maidens, frolicsome, not to say frisky, in their de- 
meanour. It is curious that the French, ordinarily so 
keen of perception and so shrewd in social dissection, 
should not, by this time, have discovered some other 
and really existent types of English tourists, male 
and female, to supply the place of the obsolete and 
well-nigh mythical c Mees,' with her long ringlets, her 
green veil, her large hands and feet, and her figure 
full of awkward and ungainly angles. And may not 
the British Baronet, with his top-boots, and his bull- 
dog, and his hoarse cries for his servant c Jhon,' and 
his perpetual thirst for 'grogs,' be reckoned among 
the extinct animals ? I was reading only yesterday, 
in the Chronique of one of the minor Parisian jour- 
nals, a couple of anecdotes most eloquent of the false 
medium through which we are still viewed by the 
lively Gaul. In the first, the scene is laid at the 
Grand Hotel. An Englishman is reading the Times 
and smoking a cigar. It is a step in advance, per- 
haps, that the Briton should have come to a cabana 
instead of pulling at a prodigiously long pipe. The 
Englishman happens to drop some hot ashes on the 



SHOCKING! 



skirt of his coat. ' Monsieur, monsieur!' cries a 
Frenchman sitting by, 'take care, you are on fire!' 

* Well, sir,' replies the Briton, indignant at being ad- 
dressed by a person to whom he has not been formally 
introduced, ' what is that to you ? You have been on 
fire twenty minutes, and 1 never mentioned the fact.' 
I refrain from giving the wonderful Anglo-French 
jargon in which the Englishman's reply is framed. 
The second anecdote is equally choice. An English 
nobleman is 'enjoying his villeggiatura at Naples' — 
by which, I suppose, is meant that he is betting on 
the chances of a proximate eruption of Mount Vesu- 
vius — when his faithful steward, Williams Johnson, 
arrives in hot haste from England. ' Well, Williams,' 
asks the nobleman, 'what is the matter?' ' If you 
please, milor, your carriage-horses have dropped down 
dead.' ' Of what did they die?' ' Of fatigue. They 
had to carry so much water to help put out the fire.' 
' What fire ?' ' That of your lordship's country-house, 
which was burnt down on the day of the funeral.' 

* Whose funeral ?' ' That of your lordship's mother, 
who died of grief on hearing that the lawsuit on 
which your lordship's fortune depended had been de- 
cided against you.' Charming anecdotes are these, 
are they not? The gentleman who popped them into 
his column of chit-chat, gave them as being of perfect 
authenticity and quite recent occurrence, and signed 
his name at the bottom ; and yet I think I have read 
two stories very closely resembling them in the ad- 
mired collection of Monsieur Joseph Miller. 

u 



290 UNDER THE SUN 



The Englishman who is the hero of cock-and-bull 
stories, and the English lady who is always veiling 
her face with her fan, and exclaiming, ' Shocking V 
are so dear to the French and the general continental 
heart, that we must look for at least another half 
century of railways, telegraphs, illustrated news- 
papers, and international colleges, before the mythical 
period passes away and the reign of substantial real- 
ism begins. I remember at the sumptuous Opera 
House at Genoa seeing a ballet called the Grateful 
Baboon, in which there was an English general who 
wore a swallow-tail coat with lapels, Hessian boots 
with tassels, a pigtail, colossal bell-pull epaulettes, and 
a shirt-frill like unto that of Mr. Boatswain Chucks. 
The audience accepted him quite as a matter of 
course, as the ordinary and recognised type of an 
English military officer of high rank ; and then I re- 
membered that during our great war with France, 
Genoa had been once occupied by an English force 
under Lord William Bentinck, and that his lordship 
had probably passed bodily into the album of cos- 
tumes of the Teatro Carlo Felice, and remained there 
unchangeable for fifty years. In like manner the 
Americans, irritated, many years since, by the stric- 
tures of Mrs. Trollope, and stung to the quick by her 
sneers at the national peculiarities of ' calculating' and 
spitting, thought they could throw the taunt back in 
our teeth by assuming that we were a nation of cock- 
neys, hopelessly given to misplacing our Hs. I had 
no sooner put down the lively Chronique containing 



SHOCKING! 291 



the Joe Millerisms than I took up a copy of the New 
York Times, a paper of very high character and re- 
spectability, and whose editor, Mr. Henry Raymond, 
one of the most distinguished of living American poli- 
ticians, is doing good service to the republic by striv- 
ing — almost alone, unhappily — to stem the tide of the 
intolerance and tyranny of the dominant faction. In 
a leading article of the New York Times I read, that 
when the British Lion was reproached with his block- 
ade-running sins, and other violations of neutrality 
during the war, the hypocritical beast turned up his 
4 cotton-coloured eyes' and whimpered, c Thou cannot 
say Hi did it.' The gentleman who wrote the leader 
doubtless thought he had hit us hard with that 4 Hi.' 
He would have shot nearer the bull's-eye had he 
asked why Lord Russell is always 'oblegecV instead 
of obliged, and why the noble proprietor of Knowsley 
is Lord 'Derby' to one set of politicians and Lord 
4 Darby' to another. But these little niceties of criti- 
cism seem to escape our neighbours. The imputation 
of cockneyism is a bit of mud that will stick. The 
Americans have made up their minds that we are 
'halways waunting the walour of hour harms,' and 
1 hexulting hover hour appiness hunder the ouse of 
anover.' No disclaimers on our part will cause them 
to abandon their position. Nor in this case, nor in 
that of c Shocking,' do we lie open, I venture to 
think, to accusations of a tu quoque nature. We cari- 
cature our neighbours more closely and observantly 
than they do us. We have found out long since that 



292 UNDER THE SUN 



the Yankee is not invariably a sallow man in a broad- 
brimmed straw hat, and a suit of striped nankeen, 
who sits all day in a rocking-chair with his feet on 
the mantelpiece, sucking mint julep through a straw. 
We know the circumstances under which he will put 
his feet up, and the seasons most favourable to the 
consumption of juleps. We have even ceased to 
draw him as he really was frequently visible, some 
twenty years since, as a cadaverous straight-haired 
individual, clean shaved, in a black tail-coat and pan- 
taloons, a black satin waistcoat, and a fluffy hat stuck 
on the back of his head, and the integument of his left 
cheek much distended by a plug of tobacco. 

The English painter of manners takes the modern 
American as he finds him: a tremendous dandy, 
rather 'loud' in make-up, fiercely moustached and 
bearded, ringed and chained to the eyes, and, on the 
continent of Europe at least, quoting Rafaelles and 
Titians, Canovas and Thorwaldsens, as confidently as 
he would discourse of quartz or petroleum in Wall- 
street. We know that he has long since ceased to 
'calculate' or 'reckon,' and that it is much, now, if he 
' guesses' or ' expects.' Not long ago, at Venice, an 
old English traveller was telling me of an American 
family with whom he had travelled from Florence to 
Bologna. One of the young ladies of the party, it 
seems, did not approve of the railway accommodation, 
and addressed the Italian guard in this wise : ' My 
Christian friend, is this a first-class kyar, or a cattle - 
wagon?' At a subsequent stage of the journey the 



SHOCKING! 293 



eldest gentleman of the group had remarked: ' Say, if 
any of you gals bought frames at Florence, I can sup- 
ply you with a lot o' picturs I got at Rome, cheap.' 
c They were model Yankees,' the old English traveller 
chuckled, as he told me the story. ' Not at all,' I made 
bold to answer; 'they were very exceptional Yankees 
indeed. They were, probably, shoddy people of the 
lowest class, rapidly enriched, and who had rushed off 
to Europe to air their new jewelry and their vulgarity.' 
Nine-tenths of the Americans one meets travelling 
abroad nowadays are well-informed and intelligent 
persons, often more fully appreciative of the beauties 
of art than middle-class English tourists. The Ameri- 
can's ambition extends to everything, in the heavens 
above and on the earth beneath, and in the waters 
under the earth. If he doesn't appreciate Italian pic- 
tures, his wife and daughters will, so that at least 
there shall be a decent amount of connoisseurship in 
the family; whereas to the middle- class English for- 
eign picture galleries are usually an intolerable bore ; 
and Paterfamilias very probably labours, besides, un- 
der a vague and secretly uneasy feeling that it does 
not become a man with less than twenty thousand a 
year and a handle to his name to talk of Rafaelles and 
Titians. There may be vulgar pretenders among the 
Americans whom one meets roving through the 
churches and galleries of the Continent — among what 
nation are vulgarity and pretence not to be found? — 
but take them for all in all, the love and appreciation 
for high art, although its very elements are of yester- 



294 UNDER THE SUN. 

day's introduction, are more generally discriminated 
in the United States than in England. The amazing 
development of photography, and the consequent cir- 
culation of the noblest examples of art at very cheap 
rates, together with the American mania for travel- 
ling, are the leading causes of their precocious pro- 
ficiency in studies in which our middle classes are, 
as yet, but timid and bungling beginners. 

It is true that they have not yet learnt to discrim- 
inate between Englishmen whose speech is that of 
educated gentlemen, and those who put their Hs in 
the wrong place. Perhaps their ears are at fault. There 
are none so deaf as those who will not hear. But I 
adhere to my position, that we are able to jot down 
their little changes of manners more accurately than 
they are able to do ours. We do not wear our jokes 
against them threadbare, or worry their foibles to 
death after the French fashion. Pennsylvania repu- 
diation was a good jest in its day, made all the more 
bitter by being almost wholly destitute of foundation 
in truth ; but no one could help laughing at Sydney 
Smith's denunciations of the c men in drab,' and his 
comically vindictive wish to cut up a Quaker, and ap- 
portion him, buttonless coat, broad-brimmed hat and 
all, among the defrauded bondholders. When it was 
discovered that Pennsylvania paid her obligations, the 
jokes about pails of whitewash grew stale, and we 
abandoned them for good. So it was with the great 
sea-serpent. For years the English newspapers used 
to have their weekly quota of examples of American 



SHOCKING! 295 



exaggeration and longbowism. We used to read about 
the cow which, being left out on a frosty night, never 
afterwards gave anything but ice-creams ; about the 
man who was so tall that he had to climb up a ladder 
to take his hat off; about the discontented clock down 
east, which struck work instead of the hours. These 
jokes, too, have now become stale, and barely suffice 
to gain a giggle from the sixpenny seats when emitted 
by the comic singer at a music-hall. Sarcasms anent 
American brag and bunkum have not quite died out 
from English conversation and English journalism; 
for, unfortunately, the newest file of American papers 
are full of evidence that bunkum and brag are, on the 
other side of the Atlantic, as current as ever. 

How is it that, when foreigners wish to quiz us, 
however good humouredly, they always date their 
witticisms from the morrow of the battle of Waterloo? 
The English began to be habitual travellers in the 
autumn of 1815. To us who know, or fancy that we 
know ourselves, the changes which have taken place 
in our manners and customs since that period are mar- 
vellous ; but to foreigners we seem to be precisely the 
same people who came rushing to Paris when the 
allies were in the Palais Royal, and have since over- 
run every nook and corner of Europe. AVe know 
what we were like in '15; we had been bereft for 
twelve years of the Erench fashions. It was only once 
in some months or so that a Paris bonnet, or the de- 
sign for a Paris dress, was furtively conveyed to us 
from Nantes or Hamburg in a smuggling lugger. Of 



296 UNDER THE SUN. 

the French language and of French literature we were 
almost entirely ignorant. To be a fluent French 
scholar was to be put down either as a diplomatist or 
a spy ; and not all diplomatists could speak French. 
We had not learned to waltz ; and foreigners invited 
to the houses of English residents in Paris used to 
turn up their eyes at our barbarous country dances 
and hoidenish Sir Roger de Coverley. We knew no 
soup but turtle and pea; no made dishes but Irish 
stew and liver -and- bacon ; no wines but port and 
sherry ; claret gave us the cholic ; champagne was only 
found at the tables of princes. We used to drink hot 
brandy-and-water in the morning. We used to get 
drunk after dinner. We had no soda-water. We had 
no cigars, and smoking a pipe was an amusement in 
winter few persons besides ship captains, hackney- 
coachmen, and the Reverend Dr. Parr, indulged. Our 
girls were bread-and-butter romps; our boys were 
coarse and often profligate hobbledehoys, whose idea 
of 'life' was to drink punch at the Finish, and beat the 
watch. Our fathers and mothers were staid and prim, 
and somewhat sulky, and carried with them every- 
where a bigoted hatred of popery, and a withering 
contempt of foreigners. This is what we were like in 
1815; and, in '15, I can easily understand that the 
angular young woman in the coal-scuttle bonnet and 
the green veil, who was always crying i Shocking !' 
was as possible a personage as the baronet in top- 
boots who continually swore at 'Jhon,' his jockey, and 
roared for fresh grogs. 



SHOCKING! 297 



But can it be that we have not changed since the 
morrow of Waterloo ? If we are to believe our critics, 
we are the self-same folk. It seems to me that we 
have let our beards and moustaches grow, and have 
become the most hirsute people in Europe; but a 
Charivari Englishman, or a Gustave Dore English- 
man, or a Bouffes Parisiennes Englishman, is always 
the same simpering creature, with smooth upper and 
under lip, and bushy whiskers. Types must be pre- 
served, you may argue. As a simpering and whis- 
kered creature, the Englishman is best known abroad, 
and foreigners have as much right to preserve him 
intact as we have to preserve our traditional John 
Bull. But may I be allowed to point out that a type 
may become so worn and blunted as to be no longer 
worth printing from? For instance, there is the 
Frenchman in a cocked-hat and a pigtail and high- 
heeled shoes, and with a little fiddle protruding from 
his hinder pocket. That- Frenchman's name was 
Johnny Crapaud. His diet was frogs. His profes- 
sion was to teach dancing. One Englishman could 
always thrash three Johnny Crapauds. We have 
broken up that type for old metal; and it has been 
melted again, and recast into something more nearly 
approaching the actual Crapaud. Let me see; how 
many years is it since the lamented John Leech drew 
that droll cartoon in Punch entitled Foreign Affairs? 
It must be a quarter of a century, at least. He de- 
lineated the Frenchman of his day to the life : the 
Frenchman of the old Quadrant and Fricourt's and 



UNDER THE SUN 



Dubourg's, and the stuffy little passport- office in 
Poland- street. That Frenchman — long haired, dirty, 
smouchy, greasy — has passed away. Before he died, 
Mr. Leech found out the new types ; the fat yet dap- 
per 'Mossoos,' with the large shirt-fronts and the 
dwarfed hats, who engage a barouche and a valet de 
place at Pagliano's, and go for c a promenade to Rich- 
mond.' And had Mr. Leech's life been prolonged, 
he would have discovered the still later type of 
Frenchman — the Parisian of the Lower Empire, the 
Frenchman of the Jockey Club and the Courses de 
Vincennes — the Frenchman who has his clothes made 
by Mr. Poole, or by the most renowned Parisian 
imitator of the artist of Saville-row, who reads Le 
Sport and goes upon le Tourff, and rides in his 
4 bromm' and eats his 'laounch,' and, if he could 
only be cured of the habit of riding like a miller's 
sack and sitting outside a cafe on the Boulevards, 
would pass muster very well for a twin-brother of 
our exquisites of the Raleigh and Gatt's. 

It is all of no use, however, I fear. ' For good old 
true-blue Toryism, and a determined hatred to new- 
fangled ways, socially speaking, you must go abroad, 
and especially to France. In prose and verse, in 
books and newspapers, in lithographs, and etchings, 
.and terra-cotta statuettes, the traditional Englishman 
&nd the traditional Englishwoman will continue to ap- 
pear as something quite different from that which they 
really are. In the halcyon day when it is discovered 
that we are no more 'perfidious' than our neigh- 



SHOCKING! 299 



bours, and that, in the way of greedy rapacity for the 
petty profits of trade, the French are ten times more 
of a nation of shopkeepers than we are — then, but not 
till then, it may be acknowledged that the English 
female's anatomy is not made up exclusively of right 
angles, and that the first word in an Englishwoman's 
vocabulary is not always c Shocking !' 



KING PIPPIN'S PALACE. 

I deeply regret that it should be my duty to sound 
the alarm; but I am constrained to state my fears 
that there is something the matter with our old and, 
generally, esteemed friend the Dwarf. I don't meet 
him in society, that is to say, at the fairs as I was 
wont to do ; and although I do not overlook the fact 
that I have ceased to attend fairs, and that, indeed, 
there are very few fairs of the old kind left to fre- 
quent, it is difficult to avoid the unpleasant convic- 
tion that dwarfs, as a race, are dying out. Very re- 
cently, in his strange, eloquent romance, TJ Homme 
qui rit, M. Yictor Hugo has told us that the pigmy, 
preferably monstrous and deformed, whose pictured 
semblance is to be found in so many works of the old 
Italian and German masters, was, to most intents and 
purposes, a manufactured article. That mysterious 
association of the c Comprachicos,' of whom M. Hugo 
has told us so many strange things, pursued, among 
their varied branches of industry, the art of fabri- 
cating hunchbacked, abdominous, hydrocephalus, 
and spindle-shanked dwarfs for the European market : 
the purchasers being the princes, potentates, and 
wealthy nobles of the continent. The Comprachicos 



KING PIPPIN'S PALACE. 301 

would seem to have borrowed the mystery of dwarf- 
making from the Chinese, who had an agreeable way 
of putting a young child into a pot of arbitrary form, 
from which the top and bottom had been knocked 
out, and in the sides of which were two holes, through 
which the juvenile patient's arms protruded. The 
merry consequence was that young masters body, if 
he did not die during the process, grew to be of the 
shape of the pot, and, so far as the torso went, the 
order of amateurs for a spherical dwarf, or an oval 
dwarf, or a hexagonal dwarf, or a dwarf with knobs 
on his chest, or an ' egg-and- tongue' pattern on his 
shoulders, could be executed with promptitude and 
dispatch.* 

But we have another informant, of perhaps greater 
weight and authority, who has told us in wh.it manner 
dwarfs, and bandy, and rickety, and crooked-spin ed 

* Setting M. Hugo's wild myth of the Comprachicos entirely on one 
side, most students of the social history of England are aware that the 
custom of kidnapping children (generally to be sold as slaves in the 
West Indies or the American plantations) was frightfully prevalent in 
this country in the seventeenth, and during the early part of the eight- 
eenth century, and that Bristol was dishonourably distinguished as the 
port whence the greater number of the hapless victims were dispatched 
beyond sea. And it is a very curious circumstance, winch appears to 
have been overlooked by Lord Macaulay in Ins notice of Jeffries, that 
the infamous judge, shortly before the Bloody Assize, went down to 
Bristol, and delivered to the grand jury at the assizes a most eloquent 
and indignant charge, overflowing with sentiments of humanity, bearing 
on the practice of kidnapping children for the plantations — a practice 
winch his lordship roundly accused the corporation of Bristol of actively 
aiding and abetting for their own advantage and gain. Jeffries' charge 
is preserved in the library of the British Museum, and is as edifying to 
read as the sentimental ballad ' What is Love ?' by Mr. Thomas Paine, 
or as would be an Essay upon Cruelty to Animals, with proposals for 
the suppression thereof, by the late Emperor Nero. 



302 UNDER THE SUN. 

children can be manufactured without the aid either 
of the Comprachicos or of the Chinese potters. The 
learned and amiable Cheselden has dwelt minutely in 
his Anatomy on the wickedly cruel and barbarous 
folly which marked the system of nursing babies in 
his time, and has shown how the practice of tightly 
swaddling ^and unskilfully carrying infants was calcu- 
lated to cripple and deform their limbs, and to stunt 
their growth. We have grown wonderfully wiser 
since Cheselden's time, although I have heard some 
cynics mutter that the custom of growing children 
in pipkins could not have been more detrimental to 
health or to the symmetry of the human form than is 
the modern fashion of tight-lacing. 

Be all this as it may, I still hold that the dwarf — 
well, the kind of dwarf who can be seen for a penny 
at a fair — continues, as the French say, 'to make 
himself desired.' Surely his falling off must be due 
to the surcease of the manufacture. Old manufac- 
tured dwarfs are as difficult to light upon as Mort- 
lake tapestry or Chelsea china, simply, I suppose, be- 
cause tapestry is no longer woven at Mortlake, and 
Chelsea produces no more porcelain ware. To an 
amateur of dwarfs it is positively distressing to read 
the numerous detailed accounts which the historians 
have left us of bygone troglodytes. Passing by such 
world-famous manikins as Sir Jeffery Hudson and 
Count Borulawski, where can one hope, in this de- 
generate age, to light on a Madame Teresia, better 
known by the designation of the Corsican Fairy, who 



KING PIPPIN'S PALACE. 303 

came to London in 1773, being then thirty years of 
age, thirty-four inches high, and weighing twenty-six 
pounds? c She possessed much vivacity and spirit 7 
could speak Italian and French with fluency, and 
gave the most inquisitive mind an agreeable enter- 
tainment.' England has produced a rival to Madame 
Teresia in Miss Anne Shepherd, who was three feet 
ten inches in height, and was married, in Charles the 
First's time, to Richard Gibson, Esq., page of the 
backstairs to his majesty, and a distinguished mini- 
ature painter. Mr. Gibson was just forty-six inches 
high, and he and his bride were painted 'in whole 
length' by Sir Peter Lely. The little couple are 
said to have had nine children, who all attained the 
usual standard of mankind ; and three of the boys, 
according to the chronicles of the backstairs, enlisted 
in the Life Guards. 

But what are even your Hudsons and your Gib- 
sons, your Corsican Fairies and your Anne Shep- 
herds, to the dwarfs of antiquity? Where am I to 
look for a parallel to the homunculus who flourished 
in Egypt in the time of the Emperor Theodosius, and 
who was so small of body that he resembled a par- 
tridge, yet had all the functions of a man, and would 
sing tunably ? Mark Antony is said to have owned 
a dwarf called Sisyphus, who was not of the full 
height of two feet, and was yet of a lively wit. Had 
this Sisyphus been doomed to roll a stone it must 
surely have been no bigger than a schoolboy's marble. 
Ravisius — who was Ravisius ? — narrates that Au- 



304 UNDER THE SUN. 

gustus Caesar exhibited in his plays one Lucius, a 
young man born of honest parents, who was twenty- 
three inches high, and weighed seventeen pounds ; yet 
had he a strong voice. In the time of Jamblichus, 
also, lived Alypius of Alexandria, a most excellent 
logician, and a famous philosopher, but so small in 
body that he hardly exceeded a cubit, or one foot five 
inches and a half in height. And, finally, Carden tells 
us — but who believes Carden? — that he saw a man 
of full age in Italy, not above a cubit high, and who 
was carried about in a parrot's cage. * This,' re- 
marks Wanley, in his Wonders of the Little World, 
' would have passed my belief had I not been told 
by a gentleman of a clear reputation, that he saw a 
man at Sienna, about two years since, not exceeding 
the same stature. A Frenchman he was, of the county 
of Limosin, with a formal beard, who was likewise 
shown in a cage for money, at the end whereof was 
a little hatch into which he retired, and when the as- 
sembly was full came forth and played on an instru- 
ment.' The very thing we have all seen at the fairs, 
substituting the simulacrum of a three-storied house 
for a cage, and not forgetting the modern improve- 
ments of the diminutive inmate ringing a bell, and 
firing a pistol out of the first-floor window ! 

And after banqueting on these bygone dwarfs, 
who were scholars and gentlemen, as well as mon- 
strosities, for was not Alypius, cited above, a famous 
logician and philosopher? and did not Eichard Gib- 
son, Esq., teach Queen Anne the art of drawing, and 



KING PIPPIN'S PALACE. 305 

proceed on a special mission to Holland to impart 
artistic instruction to the Princess of Orange ? after 
dwelling on the dwarfs who formed part of the retinue 
of William of Normandy when he invaded England, 
and who held the bridle of the Emperor Otho's horse; 
after remembering the dwarfs whom Dominichino 
and Rafaelle, Velasquez and Paul Veronese have in- 
troduced in their pictures ; after this rich enjoyment 
of dwarfish record I am thrown back on General Tom 
Thumb. I grant the General, and the Commodore, 
and their ladykind a decent meed of acknowledg- 
ment. I confess them calm, self-possessed, well-bred, 
and innocuous ; but I have no heart to attend their 
1 levees.' Nutt, in the caricature of a naval uniform, 
does not speak to my heart ; I have no ambition to 
see Thumb travestied as the late Emperor Napoleon 
— that conqueror could, on occasion, cause himself to 
appear even smaller than Thumb — nor am I desirous 
of purchasing photographic cartes de visite of Minnie 
Warren. My dwarf is the gorgeously-attired little 
pagod of the middle ages ; the dwarf who pops out 
of a pie at a court banquet ; the dwarf who runs be- 
tween the court-jester's legs and trips him up; the 
dwarf of the king of Brobdingnag, who is jealous of 
Gulliver, and souses his rival in a bowl of cream, and 
gets soundly whipped for his pains. Or, in default 
of this pigmy, give me back the dwarf of my youth 
in his sham three-storied house, with his tinkling bell 
and sounding pistol. 

It is not to be, I presume. These many years 

x 



306 UNDER THE SUN 

past I have moodily disbursed in divers parts of the 
world sundry francs, lire, guilders, florins, thalers, 
reals, dollars, piastres, and mark-banco for the sight 
of dwarfs; but they (Thumb and his company in- 
cluded) have failed to come up to my standard of 
dwarfish excellence. Did you ever meet with any- 
thing or anybody that could come up to that same 
standard? Man never is, but always to be blest; 
still, although my dreams of dwarfs have not as yet 
been fully realised, I have been able to enjoy the 
next best thing to fulfilment. I call to mind per- 
haps the wonderfullest dwarf's house existing on the 
surface of this crazy globe. It is a house in the con- 
struction and the furniture of which many thousands 
of pounds were expended; and it was built by a king 
for his son. It is for this reason that I have called 
the diminutive mansion ' The Palace of King Pippin. 7 
King Pippin's Palace is in Spain, and has been 
shamefully neglected by English tourists in that in- 
teresting country. For my part I think that it would 
be a great advantage to picturesque literature if the 
Alhambra and the Alcazar, the Bay of Cadiz and the 
Rock of Gibraltar, the Sierra Morena and the Mez- 
quita of Cordova, the Cathedral of Burgos and the 
Bridge of Toledo, could be eliminated altogether 
from Spanish topography. By these means travellers 
in Spain would have a little more leisure to attend 
to a number of ' cosas de Espaiia' which are at pre- 
sent passed by almost without notice. Among them 
is this incomparable dwarf's house of mine. You will 



KING PIPPIN'S PALACE. 307 

observe that I have excluded the Escorial from the 
catalogue of places which English sight-seers in the 
Peninsula might do well, for a time, to forget. The 
Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo must needs be 
visited, for King Pippin's Palace is a de}3endency 
of that extraordinary pile. Few tourists have the 
courage to admit, in print at least, that this palace- 
monastery or monastery-palace of the Escorial is a 
gigantic bore. When it was my lot to visit it, my 
weariness began even before I had entered its halls ; 
for in the railway carriage which conveyed our party 
from Madrid to the 4 Gridiron station' there was a 
fidgety little Andalusian, a maker of guitar-strings, 
I think he was, at Utrera, who was continually re- 
bounding on the cushions like a parched pea in a 
fire-shovel, and crying out to us, c El edificio, cabal- 
leros, clonde esta el edificio?' It was his first visit to 
the northern provinces of his native country, and he 
was burning to see the 'edificio.' To him, evidently, 
there was but one edifice in the world, and that was 
the Escorial. When at last he caught sight of its 
sullen facades, its stunted dome and blue-slate roofs, 
the little Andalusian fell into a kind of ecstasy, and 
protruded so much of his body out of the carriage- 
window, that I expected him every moment to disap- 
pear altogether. To my surprise, however, when the 
train drew up at the station he did not alight, but 
murmuring the conventional ' Pues, sefiores, echemos 
un cigar ito,' 'Well, gentlemen, let us make a little 
cigar,' calmly rolled up a tube of paper with tobacco^ 



308 UNDER THE SUN 

lit it, and adding, 4 Vamos al Norte/ subsided into 
sleep, and, the train aiding, pursued his journey to 
the Pyrenees, or Paris, or the North Pole, or where- 
soever else he was bound. He was clearly a philo- 
sopher. He had seen c el edificio' from afar off. Was 
not that enough? I daresay when he went back to 
Utrera he talked guide-book by the page to his 
friends, and minutely described all the marvels of 
the interior of the palace. I rarely think of the little 
Andalusian without recalling Sheridan's remark to 
his son Tom, about the coal-pits: 'Can't you say 
youVe been down?' 

The 4 edifice' itself is really and without exag- 
geration a bore. The good pictures have all been 
taken away to swell the attractions of the Eeal Museo 
at Madrid; the jolly monks have been driven out, 
and replaced by a few meagre, atrabilious-looking, 
shovel-hatted seminarists (even these, since the last 
political earthquake in Spain, may have disappeared) ; 
and it is with extreme difficulty that you can per- 
suade the custodes to show you the embroidered 
vestments in the sacristy, or the illuminated manu- 
scripts in the library. The guardians of every public 
building in Spain have a settled conviction that all 
foreign travellers are Frenchmen, who, following the 
notable example of Marshals Soult and Victor in the 
Peninsular War, are bent on stealing something. 
Moreover, the inspection of embroidered copes, dal- 
matics, and chasubles, soon palls on sight-seers who 
are not crazy on the subject of Ritualism; and as for 



KING PIPPIN'S PALACE. 309 

being trotted through a vast library when you have 
no time to read the books, all I can say is, that in 
this respect I prefer a bookstall in Gray's-inn-lane, 
with free access to the 4 twopenny box,' to the library 
of the Escorial, to the Bibliotheque (ex-)Imperiale, 
the Bodleian, Sion College, and the library of St. 
Mark to boot. The exterior of the Escorial, again, 
is absolutely hideous ; its grim granite walls, pierced 
with innumerable eyelet-holes, with green shutters, 
remind the spectator of the Wellington Barracks, 
Colney-Hatch Lunatic-Asylum, and the Xrreat North- 
ern Hotel at King's-Cross. The internal decorations 
principally consist of huge, sprawling, wall-and- 
ceiling frescoes by Luca Giordano, surnamed c Luca 
fa Presto,' or Luke in a Hurry. This Luke the 
Labourer has stuck innumerable saints, seraphs, 
and other celestial personages upon the plaster. He 
executed his apotheoses by the yard, for which he 
was paid according to a fixed tariff — a reduction, I 
suppose, being made for clouds ; and the result of his 
work is about as interesting as that of Sir James 
Thornhill in the Painted Hall of Greenwich Hospital. 
Almost an entire day must be spent if you wish to 
see the Escorial thoroughly, and you grow, at last, 
fretful and peevish wellnigh to distraction at the 
jargon of the guides, with their monotonous statistics 
of the eleven thousand windows of the place, the two 
thousand and two feet of its area, the sixty-three 
fountains, the twelve cloisters, the sixteen ' patios' or 
courtyards, the eighty staircases, and so forth. As 



310 UNDER THE S'UN. 

for the relics preserved of that nasty old man Philip 
the Second, his greasy hat, his walking-stick, his 
shabby elbow-chair, the board he used to rest .his 
gouty leg on, they never moved me. There is some- 
thing beautifully and pathetically interesting in the 
minutest trifle which remains to remind us of Mary 
Queen of Scots. Did you ever see her watch, in the 
shape of a death's-head, the works in the brain-pan, 
and the dial enamelled on the base of the jaw? But 
who would care about a personal memento of Bloody 
Queen Mary? She was our countrywoman, but 
most of us wish to forget her bad individuality 
utterly. Should we care anything more about her 
Spanish husband? 

To complete the lugubrious impressions which 
gather round you in this museum of cruelty, super- 
stition, and madness, you are taken to an appalling 
sepulchre underground : a circular vault, called, ab- 
surdly enough, the c Pantheon,' where, on ranges of 
marble shelves, are sarcophagi containing the ashes 
of all the kings and queens who have afflicted Spain 
since the time of Charles the Fifth. The bonehouse 
is rendered all the more hideous by the fact of its 
being ornamented in the most garishly theatrical 
manner with porphyry and verde antique, with green 
and yellow jasper, with bronze gilt bas-reliefs, and 
carvings in variegated marble, and other gimcracks. 
There is an old English locution which laughs at the 
man who would put a brass knocker on a pigsty- 
door. Is such an architect worthier of ridicule than 



KING PIPPINS PALACE. 311 

he who paints and gilds and tricks -up a charnel- 
house to the similitude of a playhouse ? As, with a 
guttering wax- taper in your hand, you ascend the 
staircase leading from the Pantheon into daylight 
and the world again, your guide whispers to you 
that to the right is another and ghastlier Golgotha, 
where the junior scions of Spanish royalty are buried, 
or rather where their coffins lie huddled together 
pell-mell. The polite name for this place, which 
might excite the indignation of ; graveyard ' "Walker 
(he put a stop to intramural interments hi England, 
and got no thanks for his pains), is the 4 Pantheon of 
the Infantes.' The common people call it, with much 
more brevity and infinitely more eloquence, i El Pu- 
dridero,' the 'rotting -place.' The best guide-book 
you can take with you to this portion of the Escorial 
is Jeremy Taylor's sermon on Death. 

Once out of the Escorial, ' Luke's iron crown' — I 
mean the crown of Luca fa Presto's ponderous heroes 
— is at once removed from your brow, on which it 
has been pressing with the deadest of weights. Once 
rid of the Pantheon, and the stone staircases, and the 
slimy cloisters, and you feel inclined to chirrup, al- 
most. The gardens are handsome, although shock- 
ingly out of repair ; but bleak as is the site, swept by 
the almost ceaseless mountain blasts of the Guadar- 
rama range, it is something to be of rid Luca fa Presto, 
and Philip the Second, and St. Lawrence and his 
gridiron, and all their gloomy company. You breathe 
again ; and down in the village yonder there is a not 



3 i2 UNDER THE SUN 



bad inn, called the Biscaina, where they cook very 
decent omelettes, and where the wine is drinkable. 
But before you think of dining, you must see King 
Pippin's Palace. 

This is the ' Casita del Principe de abajo,' the 
'little house of the prince on the heights,' and was 
built by Juan de Villanueva for Charles the Fourth, 
when heir-apparent. The only circumstances, per- 
haps, under which a king of Spain can be contem- 
plated with complacency are those of childhood. In 
Madrid I used always to have a sneaking kindness 
for the infantes and infantas — ' los ninos de Espafia, 
— who, Avith their nurses and governesses, and their 
escort of dragoons and lancers, used to be driven 
every afternoon, in their gilt coaches drawn by fat 
mules, through the Puerta del Sol to the Retiro. The 
guard at the Palace of the Gobernacion would turn 
out, the trumpets would be flourished bravely as 'los 
ninos' went by. Poor little urchins ! In the pictures 
of Don Diego Velasquez, the ' ninos,' in their little 
ruffs, and kirtles, and farthingales, or their little 
starched doublets and trunk-hose, with their chubby 
peachy cheeks, their ruddy lips, and great melting 
black eyes, look irresistibly fascinating. Ah ! my in- 
fantes and infantas of Don Diego, why did you not 
remain for aye at the toddlekins' stage ? why did you 
grow up to be tyrants, and madmen, and bigots, and 
imbeciles, and no better than you should have been? 
This Carlos the Fourth, for instance, for whom King 
Pippin's Palace was built, made an exceedingly bad 



KING PIPPIN'S PALACE. 313 

end of it. He was the king who was led by the nose 
by a worthless wife, and a more worthless favourite, 
Godoy, who was called ' Prince of the Peace/ and 
who lived to be quite forgotten, and to die in a garret 
in Paris. Carlos the Fourth was the idiot who al- 
lowed Napoleon to kidnap him. He was the father of 
the execrable Ferdinand the Seventh, the betrayer of 
his country, the restorer of the Inquisition, and the 
embroiderer of petticoats for the Yirgin. 

King, or rather Prince Pippin, Charles the Third's 
son, is represented in a very curious style of portrai- 
ture, in one of the apartments of the Escorial itself, a 
suite fitted up by his father in anti-monastic style 
that is to say, in the worst kind of Louis Quinze ro- 
coco. The king employed the famous Goya to make 
a series of designs to be afterwards woven on a large 
scale in tapestry; and Goya consequently produced 
some cartoons which, with their reproductions in 
loom-work, may be regarded as the burlesque anti- 
podes to the immortal patterns which Eafaelle set 
the weavers of Arras. In one of the Goya hangings 
you see the juvenile members of the royal family at 
their sports, attended by a select number of young 
scions of the sangre azul. At what do you think they 
are playing? at bull-fighting: a game very popular 
among the blackguard little street-boys of Madrid 
to this day. One boy plays Bos. He has merely to 
pop a cloth over his head, holding two sticks passing 
through holes in the cloth at obtuse angles to his 
head, to represent the horns of the animal. The 



314 UNDER THE SUN 



1 picadores' are children pickaback, who, with canes 
for lances, tilt at the bull. The ' chulos' trail their 
jackets, the ' bandarilleros' fling wreathed hoops ticks 
for darts, in admirable caricature of the real blood- 
thirsty game you see in the bull-ring. Prince Pippin 
of course is the ' matador/ the shiyer. He stands 
alone, superb and magnanimous, intrepidity in his 
mien, fire in his eye, and a real little Toledo rapier in 
his hand. Will the bull dare to run at the heir-ap- 
parent of the throne of Spain and the Indies ? Quien 
sabe ? Train up a child in the way he should go ; 
and a youth of bull-fighting is a fit preparative for a 
manhood of cruelty and an old age of bigoted super- 
stition. 

It is somewhat difficult to give an idea of the pre- 
cise size of Pippin's Palace. Mr. Ford, who speaks of 
the entire structure with ineffable contempt, says that 
it is c just too small to live in, and too large to wear 
on a watch-chain f but I maintain that the Casita del 
Principe is quite big enough to be the country resid- 
ence of Thumb, or Nutt, or Miss Warren, or Gibson, 
or Hudson, or Ann Shepherd, or Madame Teresia, or 
Wybrand Lolkes the Dutch dwarf; a wonderful little 
fellow with a head like a dolphin's, no perceptible 
trunk, and two little spindle-shanks like the legs of a 
skeleton clock. There should properly be a statue 
oast from the Manneken at Brussels in the vestibule of 
the Casita; but, if I recollect aright, the only object 
of sculpture in the hall is a life-size cast of the Apollo 
Belvedere, whose head of course touches the palatial 



KING PIPPINS PALACE. 315 

ceiling. Could that inanimate effigy stand on tiptoe, 
he would assuredly send the first floor flying; and 
could he perform but one vertical leap, he would have 
the roof off the palace in the twinkling of a bedpost. 
There is a tiny grand staircase, which (from dolorous 
experience) I know to be somewhat of a tight fit for 
a stout tourist; and to increase the exquisite grotes- 
queness of the whole affair, the walls are panelled in 
green and yellow jasper and porphyry, and there are 
verde-antique columns and scagliola pilasters, and 
bas-reliefs in gilt bronze on every side, just as there 
are in the horrible tomb-house hard by. There are 
dozens of rooms in King Pippin's Palace : dining- 
rooms, audience - chambers, council -chambers, bed- 
rooms, libraries, ante-chambers, boudoirs, guard- 
rooms, and ball-rooms, the dimensions of which vary 
between those of so many store-cupboards, and so 
many midshipmen's sea-chests. But the pearl, the 
cream, the consummation of the crack-brained joke is, 
that the furniture does not in any way harmonise with 
the proportions of the building. The house is a baby 
one, but the furniture is grown up. The chairs and 
tables are suited for the accommodation of adults of 
full growth. The walls are hung with life-size por- 
traits of the Spanish Bourbons. The busts, statuettes, 
French clocks, chandeliers, China gimcracks, and 
ivory baubles, are precisely such as* you might see in 
a palace inhabited by grown-up kings and princes. 
The whole place is a pippin into which a crazy king 
has endeavoured to cram the contents of a pumpkin ; 



316 UNDER THE SUN 

and, but for the high sense I entertain of the obliga- 
tions of decorum, and the indelicacy of wounding the 
susceptibilities of foreigners, I might, had the proper 
appliances been at hand, have wound up my inspec- 
tion of the Palace of King Pippin, by ringing a shrill 
peal on a hand-bell, or firing a pistol out of the first- 
floor window. 



STALLS. 

It may not have occurred to you, amsene reader, to 
trouble yourself much concerning the Philosophy of 
Stalls ; if, haply, you have ever thought it worth your 
while to inquire whether there was anything philoso- 
phical connected with a stall, at all. To my mind there 
is, and much. To me a stall typifies, in an intense 
degree, the quality of selfishness. I draw a direct 
alliance between a stall and celibacy. I hold the 
possession of a stall to be linked with the ideas of in- 
dependence, of isolation from, and superiority to, the 
rest of mankind. In a stall, properly so termed, you 
cannot put two people. The stalled ox is alone, and 
may look with infinite contempt on the poor sheep 
huddled together in a fold ; the cobbler who lived in 
his stall, which served him for kitchen and parlour 
and all, was, I will go bail, a bachelor. Robinson 
Crusoe, for a very long time, occupied a stall, and 
was monarch of all he surveyed. When Man Friday 
came, the recluse began to yearn to mingle with the 
world again. Diogenes in his tub perfectly fulfils 
the idea of an installed egotist. From his tub-stall he 
could witness at leisure the entire grand opera of 
Corinth. I have heard of a roval duke — one of the 
past generation of royal dukes; burly, bluff princes 



318 UNDER THE SUN 

in blue coats and brass buttons, who said everything 
twice over, drank hard, swore a good deal, and were 
immensely popular at the Crown and Anchor and the 
Thatched House Taverns — who, being in Windsor 
one Sunday afternoon, thought he would like to at- 
tend divine service in St. George's Chapel. Of course 
he was a Knight of the Garter, and had his stall in 
the old gothic fane, with his casque and banner above, 
and a brass plate let in to the oaken carving, record- 
ing what a high, mighty, and puissant prince he was. 
The chapel happened to be very crowded, and as 
H.R.H. essayed to pass through the throng towards 
his niche in the choir, a verger whispered him defer- 
entially, that a distinguished foreign visitor, his De- 
crepitude the Grand Duke of Pfenningwurst-Schin- 
kenbraten, had been popped into the place of the 
English Duke. c Don't care a rush — a rush,' quoth 
H.R.H., poking his walking-cane into the spine of a 
plebeian in front of him. ' Want to get to my stall 
— my stall.' And from it, I suppose, he eventually 
succeeded in ousting the intruder from Germany. Was 
not H.E.H. in the right? His stall was his vine and 
his fig-tree, and who was there to make him afraid? 

So much for stalls in the abstract. Practically, 
a stall may be defined as a place of occupation, in 
relative degrees, of a canon, a chorister, a cow, a 
cobbler, or a connoisseur. To study stalls most pro- 
fitably in their ecclesiastical or monastic aspect, you 
should go to Flanders or to Spain. In the grand old 
cathedrals in those countries, the traveller has always 



STALLS, 319 



free access to the choir, and can take his surfeit of 
contemplation of the stalls. They will be found, to 
the observant mind, replete with human interest. 
They may be peopled with priests. Pursy preben- 
daries, dozing the doze of the just, and dreaming- 
placidly, perchance, of good fat capon and clotted 
cream, while the brawny choirmen at the lecterns are 
thundering from huge oak-bound and brass-clamped 
folios, on the parchment pages of which corpulent 
minims and breves flounder over crimson lines; pale, 
preoccupied priests, fretfully crimping the folds of 
their surplices, and enviously eyeing my Lord Arch- 
bishop yonder, awfully enthroned, with his great 
mitre on his head, and his emerald ring glancing on 
the plump white hand which he complacently spreads- 
over the carved arm of his chair of state. Will they 
ever come to sit in that chair? those pale, preoccupied 
men may be thinking. Will they ever wear a mitre, 
and hold out their hands for an obedient flock to kiss ? 
Or will dignity and power and wealth fall to the lot 
of those drowsy prebendaries ? 

More absorbing, even, in interest than the stalls in 
the choir of a cathedral are those in a convent chapel. 
The reason is, I suppose, that a monk has always been 
to me a Mystery. A nun I can more easily under- 
stand, for the monastic state, in its best and purest 
acceptation, is a dream or an ecstasy; and there are 
vast numbers of women who pass their whole lives 
in a dreamy and ecstatic frame of mind, and in a 
species of unobtrusive hysterics. But the monk, with 



320 UNDER THE SUN 

his manhood, and his great strong frame, and the fire 
of ambition lambent in his eye, and his lips firm-set 
in volition, always puzzles me. Continental physicians 
will tell you that in every monastery there will be 
found a certain proportion of mad monks : — friars who 
have strange lunes, and hear Voices while they are 
sweeping out the chapel or extinguishing the altar- 
candles, and to whom the saints and angels in the 
pictures on the walls are living and breathing person- 
ages. I remember a dwarfish Cappuccino at Rome 
once executing a kind of holy hornpipe before Guido's 
famous painting of the Archangel vanquishing the 
Demon, and, as he jigged, taunting the fiend on the 
canvas on the low estate to which he had fallen, and 
derisively bidding him to use his claws and fangs. 
Nor do I think that I was ever more terrified in my 
life than by the behaviour of a gaunt young friar in 
the Catacombs of San Sebastiano, who, opposite the 
empty tomb of a renowned martyr, suddenly took to 
waving his taper above his head, and to abusing the 
Twelve Cassars. He was our guide, and I feared 
the candle would go out, and trembled to think what 
would become of us, lost in Necropolis. But mad 
monks, or dreamy or ecstatic monks, are sufficiently 
rare, it is to be surmised. Most of the wearers of the 
cowl and sandals with whom I have made acquaint- 
ance, seemed to be perfectly well aware of what they 
were about ; and a spirit of shrewd and pungent 
humour and drollery is not by any means an un- 
common characteristic of male inmates of the cloister. 



STALLS. 321 



As for a Knight of the Garter in his stall, I regard 
him simply as an Awful Being. Understand that, to 
strike one with sufficient awe, he should be, not in 
plain dress, but in the ' full fig' of his most noble 
order: a costume more imposing than the full uni- 
form of the captain of a man-o'-war ; and that, backed 
by the man-o'-war herself in the offing, can be war- 
ranted to send any black king on the west coast of 
Africa into fits. But a K.G., with his garter on, with 
his sweeping velvet robe, with his collar and his 
George, with his tassels and badges and bows of 
ribbons, next to Solomon in all his glory is the most 
sumptuous sight I can conceive. The very stall he 
sits in is historical ; a knight of his own name oc- 
cupied it three hundred years ago. It bears brazen 
chronicle of the doughtiest barons that ever lived. 
What should one do to get made a K.G., and to earn 
the privilege of sitting in such a stall ? Would the 
genius of Shakespeare or Dante, would the learning 
of Boyle or Milton, would the imagination of a Tenny- 
son, the graphic powers of a Millais, the researches 
of a Faraday — would even the giant intellect of a 
Brougham, help a man in the climbing upward to 
that stall? Not much, I fancy. Its occupancy is to 
be obtained only by one process, ridiculously simple, 
yet to be mastered only by very few children of hu- 
manity. ' Yous vous etes donne la peine de naitre,' 
says Figaro to Count Almaviva, in the play. To be 
K.G.'d, you must take the trouble to be born of the 
E.G. caste. 



322 UNDER THE SUN 

But envy, avaunt ! Social fate is not without its 
compensations, and there are stalls and stalls. Lend 
me a guinea, and for a whole evening, from eight to 
nearly midnight, I can sit supreme in a stall, solitary, 
grand, absolute ; for who shall dare to turn me out ? 
The stall is mine, to have and to hold corporeally 
until the curtain has fallen on the last tableau of the 
ballet, and (in imagination at least) I can hang my 
banner and my casque over my stall, and deem my- 
self a high, mighty, and puissant prince. As the 
process, put into practice, might interfere with the 
comfort of the patrons of the Eoyal Italian Opera, 
I content myself with hanging my overcoat over the 
back of my stall, and placing my collapsible Gibus 
beneath it. I notice a large party of beautiful dames 
and damsels in a box on the pit tier, who, I am vain 
enough to think, are intently inspecting me through 
their opera-glasses. I plume myself. I pull down 
my wristbands, I smooth my shirt-front, and caress 
the bows of my cravat. I turn the favourite facet 
of my diamond ring well on to the box on the pit 
tier. If you are the sun, shall you not shine ? I 
am taken, I fondly hope, for one of the Upper Ten. 
I am aware, from eyesight acquaintance with the 
aristocracy, that my neighbour on the right, with 
the purple wig, the varnished pumps, and the ear- 
trump, is Field Marshal Lord Viscount Dumdum, 
that great Indian hero; and that the yellow-faced 
little man on my left, with the yellow ribbon at his 
button-hole, is the Troglodyte ambassador. Behind 



STALLS. 323 

me is Sir Hercules Hoof, of the Second Life-Guards. 
In front of me is the broad back — I wish, in re- 
spect to the back, that it wasn't quite so broad — of 
Mr. Bargebeam, Q.C. How are that family in the 
pit tier to know that I am not a nobleman, a diplo- 
matist, a guardsman, or a queen's counsel? I am 
clean. I had my hair dyed the day before yester- 
day. My boots are polished ; my neckcloth is starched 
stiff: my stall is as big as anybody else's. How is 
beauty in the boxes to tell that I came in (failing 
to borrow one-pound-one) with an order ? 

The playhouse stall is a thoroughly modern inno- 
vation ; and even the pit of the Italian theatres of the 
Eenaissance was destitute of seats. When Sterne first 
visited the opera in Paris, the groundlings stood to 
witness the performance, and sentinels with fixed 
bayonets were posted to appease tumults, as in the 
well-known case quoted in .the i Sentimental Journey/ 
when the irate dwarf threatened to cut off the pigtail 
of the tall German. I am old enough to remember 
when the pittites in the Scala at Milan stood. You 
paid, I think, an Austrian florin — one and eightpence 
— for bare admission to the house, and then you 
took your chance of lighting upon some lady who 
would invite you to a seat in her box; or some 
bachelor acquaintance who, having had enough of 
the performance, would surrender to you his re- 
served seat, near the orchestra, for the rest of the 
evening. Seated pits have always been common in 
our English theatres, owing to the strong determi- 



324 UNDER THE SUN 

nation of the people to make themselves comfortable 
whenever it was possible to do so ; and these reserved 
seats of the Scala were the beginning of the ex- 
clusive seats we call stalls. They are not older 
than the era of the dominion of the Austrians in 
Lombardy, after the downfall of Napoleon the First. 
There were many Milanese nobles not wealthy 
enough to take boxes for the season, and too proud 
to spunge on their friends every evening for a back 
seat in a 'palco,' and too patriotic to mingle in 
the standing-up area with the Austrian officers, who, 
according to garrison regulations, were admitted to 
the Scala at the reduced price of ninepence half- 
penny. So the manager of the Scala hit upon the 
crafty device of dividing the rows of benches near 
the orchestra into compartments, each wide enough 
to accommodate a single person, and the seats of which 
could be turned up as in the choir of a cathedral. 
Moreover, these seats were neatly fitted with hasps 
and padlocks, so that the subscriber could lock up 
his seat when, between the acts, he strolled into the 
cafFe for refreshment. Perhaps he was absent from 
Milan during the whole operatic season; and, if he 
did not choose to lend the key of his stall to a friend 
of the right political way of thinking, the seat re- 
mained inexorably closed. The system had a triple 
charm: First, the subscriber could revel to the 
fullest extent in the indulgence of that dog-in-the 
manger -like selfishness, which I have held to be 
inseparably connected with stall - holding ; next, he 



STALLS. 325 

could baffle the knavish boxkeepers, with whom in 
an Italian theatre you can always drive an immoral 
bargain, and by a trifling bribe secure a better seat 
than that for which you have originally paid ; finally, 
he could obviate the possibility of his stall being con- 
taminated by the sedentary presence of any Austrian 
general of high rank who happened to be an amateur 
of legs. High-handed as were the proceedings of the 
Tedeschi in Italy, they were wisely reluctant to in- 
terfere with the social habits of the people. 

Just before the great French Revolution, it be- 
came the fashion to place arm-chairs close to the 
orchestra of the Academy of Music for the use of 
noble visitors, who came down from their boxes to 
take a closer survey of the coryphees ; but these were 
fauteuils at large; they were few in number, and 
could be shifted from place to place at will. Verit- 
able stalls are those which, albeit they are fitted with 
arm-rests, are still immovably screwed to the floor; 
and such stalls, old playgoers will bear me out, are 
things of very recent introduction in our theatres. 
The pit of Her Majesty's Theatre was once the resort 
of the grandest dandies in London. Going over the 
new structure the other day, I observed that the pit 
proper had been almost entirely suppressed, and that 
stalls monopolised seven-tenths of the sitting-room 
of the ground area. In English theatres a similar 
monopoly has been from year to year gradually gain- 
ing strength. The most rubbishing little houses have 
now numerous rows of stalls, from which bonnets are 



326 UNDER THE SUN 

of course banished; and the pit is being quietly 
elbowed out of existence. ' The third row of the 
pit' was once a kind of bench of judgment — I don't 
say of justice — on which those tremendous dispensers 
of dramatic fame and fortune, the critics, sat. Our 
papas and mammas did not despise the pit of old 
Drury ; and I have heard tell of a lady of title who 
paid to the pit to see Master Betty, and who took 
with her a bag of sandwiches, and some sherry in a 
bottle. I think I heard tell that she lost her shoe in 
the crowd before the doors were opened. 

Should this remarkable extension of the stall sys- 
tem be considered as a blessing or an evil? Has 
it not tended to the vast increase of selfishness, super- 
ciliousness, and the pride of place ? Dear sir, if I 
were a Professor of Paradoxes, I might tell you that 
the more selfish, the more supercilious, and the 
prouder of our places we are, the likelier will be 
the attainment of universal happiness. I might whis- 
per to you that virtue is only selfishness in a sublime 
degree. But I am a professor of nothing; and I 
dread paradoxes — having had a relative once who 
was afflicted with them, and died. So I go back to 
stalls. 

The stalled ox, and the stalled cows in the byres 
of Brock, in Holland, with their tails tied up to rings 
in the rafters, I leave to their devices, for my talk is 
of men and not of beasts. But lovingly do I glance 
at the cobbler in his stall — a merry man with twink- 
ling eyes, a blue-black mazzard, and somewhat of a 



STALLS. 327 

copper nose, for ever cuddling his lapstone, smooth- 
ing his leather with sounding thwacks, drawing out 
his waxed string, working and singing, and bandying 
repartee with the butchers' boys and the fishwives 
passing his hutch. I would Mr. Longfellow had 
sung of that cobbler; for as many tuneful things 
could be said about Crispin, as about the Tillage 
Blacksmith. That he has been left unsung, I mourn 
sincerely; for times change, and types of humanity 
vanish, and I am beginning to miss that cobbler. 
Metropolitan improvements are unfavourable to him ; 
our pride and vanity militate against him ; for some- 
how we don't care about seeing our boots mended in 
public, nowadays. In old times the cobbler's stall 
was permitted to nestle in the basement of mansions 
almost aristocratic in their respectability; but, at 
present, no architect would dream of building a new 
cobbler's stall in a new house, and the old ones are 
fast disappearing. Crispin has risen in the world. 
He has taken a shop, and ' repairs ladies' and gentle- 
men's boots and shoes with punctuality and dispatch. 7 
The term ' stall,' as applied to the board on tres- 
tles, or supported perchance by a decayed washing- 
tub, laid out with apples, sweetstuff, or oysters, and 
presided over by an old Irishwoman with a stringless 
black bonnet flattened down on a mob-cap, I consider 
& misnomer. It lacks the idea of exclusive possession 
which should attach to a stall. The apple, or sweet- 
stuff, or oyster woman is but a tenant at will. She 
has no fee simple. She may be harried by the police, 



328 UNDER THE SUN 

and petitioned against by churlish shopkeeping neigh- 
bours, jealous of her poor outdoor traffic. Drunken 
roysterers may overturn her frail structure ; a reck- 
less hansom-cab driver may bring her to irretrievable 
crash and ruin; rival apple -women may compete 
with her at the opposite street corners ; and passing 
costermongers, with strong -wheeled barrows, may 
gird at her, and disparage her wares. 'Tis not a 
stall, at which she sits, but a stand, a mere thing of 
tolerance and sufferance: here to-day, and gone to- 
morrow, if the Proud Man chooses despite fully to 
use poor Biddy. But once give me sitting-room in 
a cathedral stall, and, by cock and pye, I will not 
budge! You may threaten to disestablish and dis- 
endow me, but I will carry my stall about with me, 
as old gentlemen at the sea-side carry their camp- 
stools. And if at last, by means of a measure forced 
on an Unwilling Nation by ministers more abandoned 
in their principles, Sir, than Sejanus, Empson, Dud- 
ley, Polignac, Peyronnet, or the late Sir Eobert Wal- 
pole, you declare that my Stall must be abolished, you 
shall Compensate me for its loss at a rate as rich as 
though I had always had it clamped with gold, and 
stuffed with bank notes. 



WRETCHED VILLE. 

Dunks took to drinking; and as for his matrimonial 
affairs, the late Sir Cresswell Cresswell was fain to 
take them in hand; and a pretty case was Dunks 
versus Dunks, I promise you. Having sold or mort- 
gaged every ' carcass' he possessed, and undermined 
his own with strong liquors, Dunks went into the 
Bankruptcy Court, and soon afterwards died, of a 
severe attack of rum- and- water, and trade-assignee, 
on the brain — a wholly ruined and still uncertificated 
trader. It was a sad end for a man who had once 
served the office of churchwarden, and driven his 
own chaise-cart — who had banked with the London 
and County — and whose brother-in-law's uncle was 
reputed to be the proprietor of a New-River share; 
but the mills of the gods grind small, and Dunks, to 
my thinking, only met in his decadence with his de- 
serts. When I spoke of c carcasses' just now, I did not 
intend to imply that Dunks was a wholesale butcher. 
His carcasses were of bricks and mortar, and of his 
own making. Dunks was a builder. He took the 
contract once for the Doleful-hill Lunatic Asylum, 
by which he did so well — notwithstanding the com- 
plaints of the architect in respect to the bricks — that 



330 UNDER THE SUN 

he was enabled to build a large number of semi- 
detached villas, and a still larger quantity of c car- 
casses,' as a speculation of his own. Had he been 
prudent — had common sense or even common decency 
been his guide — he might have made a fortune, and 
be living at this day in his own house at South Ken- 
sington, six storeys high, and with a belvedere at 
one end, like the Eddystone lighthouse. His wife 
might have had a box at the opera in lieu of that sad 
witness-box at the Divorce Court ; and his sons might 
be enjoying a college education instead of being (as 
I know is the case with Tom) a waiter at a chop- 
house in Pope's-Head-alley, or suffering every kind 
of hardship and privation (which I am afraid is Phil's 
mournful lot) as cabin-boy to that well-known dis- 
ciplinarian, Captain Roper, of the ship Anne and 
Sarah Cobbum of Great Grimsby. This misguided 
Dunks might have become rich, respected, and a 
member of the Metropolitan Board of Works. In- 
stead of this — flying in the face of his reason and 
experience, of which he should have had a fair share, 
seeing that he weighed nearly seventeen stone — he 
went and built Wretchedville. And then, forsooth, 
the man wondered that he was Ruined. 

The ground, to begin with, was the very worst 
in the whole county. It was an ugly, polygonal 
plot, shelving down from the higher road that leads 
from Sobbington to Doleful-hill : a clay soil, of course, 
but in very bad repute for the making of bricks. 
Indeed the clay did not seem to be fit for anything, 



WRETCHEDVILLE. 331 

save to stick to the boot-soles of people who were 
incautious enough to walk over it. When any rain 
fell, it remained here for about seven days after the 
adjoining ground had dried up. Then the clay re- 
solved itself into a solution of a dark-red colour, and 
the spot assumed the aspect of a field of gore. When 
it was not clayey, it was marshy ; and the neighbours 
had long since christened the place 4 Ague Hole.' 
Dunks in his frenzy, and with the Yale of Health 
at Hampstead in his eye, wanted to call it c Pleasant 
Hollow;' but the ground landlord, or rather landlady, 
Miss Goole (she went melancholy mad, left half her 
fortune to the Doleful-hill Asylum, and the will is 
still the subject of a nice little litigation in Chancery) 
—Miss Goole, I say, who granted Dunks his building- 
lease, insisted that the group of tenements he in- 
tended to erect should be called Wretchedville. Her 
aunt had been a Miss Wretched, of Ashby-de-la- 
Zouch. 

And Wretchedville the place remains to this day. 
Dunks did his best, or rather his worst with it. He 
proposed to drain the ground; the result of which 
was, that water made its appearance in places where 
it had not appeared before. He laid out a declivitous 
road branching downwards from the highway, and 
leading nowhere save to the reservoir of the West 
Howlington Gasworks; and a nice terminus to the 
vista did this monstrous iron tub make. He spent 
all his own money, and as much of other people's 
as he could possibly borrow, on Wretchedville, and 



332 UNDER THE SUN. 

then, as I have hinted, Bacchus and he became in- 
separable companions, and he continued to c wreathe 
the rosy bowl' and c quaff the maddening wine-cup, ? 
the two ordinarily assuming the guise of rum-and- 
water, cold, till he woke up one morning in the 
Messenger's Office in Basinghall- street, waiting for 
his protection. Swamper, the great buyer -up of 
carcasses, was a secured creditor, and came into pos- 
session of Wretchedville ; but Swamper is the world- 
known contractor, whose dealings with the Bucharest 
Improvements, and the Herzegovina Baths and Wash- 
houses Company, have been made lately the subject 
of such lively public comment. He is generally 
oscillating between his offices in Great George-street 
Westminster and the Danubian provinces, and has 
had little time to attend to Wretchedville. He has 
been heard to express an opinion that the place — the 
confounded hole he calls it — will ' turn up trumps' 
some day; and, indeed, plans for a new county 
prison, on a remarkably eligible site between Dole- 
ful-hill and Sobbington, have been hanging up for 
some time, neatly framed and glazed, in his office. 
Meanwhile the Wretchedville rents are receivable by 
Messrs. Flimsy and Quinsy, auctioneers, valuers, and 
estate agents, of Chancery-lane ; and Swamper's affairs 
being, as I am given to understand, in somewhat evil 
trim, it is not unlikely that Wretchedville, ere long, 
will fall into fresh hands. And I don't envy the man 
into whose hands it falls. 

How I came to be acquainted with Wretchedville 



WRETCHEDVILLE. 333 



was in this wise. I was in quest, last autumn, of a 
nice quiet place within a convenient distance of town, 
where I could finish an epic poem — or, stay, was 
it a five - act drama? — on which I had been long 
engaged, and where I could be secure from the 
annoyance of organ-grinders, and of reverend gentle- 
men leaving little subscription -books one day, and 
calling for them the next — I should like to know 
what difference there is between them and the people 
who leave the packets of steel pens, and the patent 
lamp-globe protector, and Bullinger's History of the 
Inquisition, under the special patronage of the Arch- 
bishop of Tobago, to be continued in monthly parts — 
together with the people who want your autograph, 
and others who want money, and things of that kind. 
I pined for a place where one could be very snug, 
and where one's friends didn't drop in 'just to look 
you up, old fellow;' and where the post didn't come 
in too often. So I packed up a bag of needments, 
and availing myself of a mid-day train, on the Great 
Domdaniel Railway, alighted haphazard at a station. 
It turned out to be Sobbington. I saw at a 
glance that Sobbington was too fashionable, not to 
say stuck-up, for me. The Waltz from Faust was 
pianofortetically audible from at least half-a-dozen 
semi-detached windows; and this, combined with 
some painful variations on c Take, then, the Sabre,' 
and a cursory glance into a stationer's shop and 
fancy warehouse, where two stern mammas, of low- 
church aspect, were purchasing the back numbers of 



334 UNDER THE SUN. 

the New Pugwell-square Pulpit, and three young 
ladies were telegraphically inquiring, behind their 
parent's backs, of the young person at the counter, 
whether any letters had been left for them, sufficed 
to accelerate my departure from Sobbington. The 
next station on the road, I was told, was Doleful- 
hill, and then came Deadwood Junction. I thought 
I would take a little walk, and see what the open 
and what the covert yielded. I left my bag with a 
moody porter at the Sobbington station, and trudged 
along the road which had been indicated to me as 
leading to Doleful-hill. It happened to be a very 
splendid afternoon. There were patches of golden 
and of purple gorse skirting those parts of the road 
in which the semi-detached villa eruption had not 
yet broken out; the distant hills were delicately 
blue, and the mellow sun was distilling his rays into 
diamonds and rubies on the roof of a wondrous 
Palace of Glass, which does duty in these parts, as 
Vesuvius does duty in Naples, as a Pervading Pre- 
sence. At Pcrtici and at Torre del Greco, at Sob- 
bington or at Doleful -hill, turn whithersoever you 
will, the Mountain seems close upon you always. 

It is true that I was a little dashed, when I en- 
countered an organ - grinder lugubriously winding 
4 Slap bang, here we are again!' off his brazen reel, 
and looking anything but a jolly dog. Organ-grind- 
ing was contrary to the code I had laid down to 
govern my retirement. But the autumnal sun shone 
very genially on this child of the sunny South — who 



WRETCHED VILLE. 335 



had possibly come from the bleakest part of Pied- 
mont — his smile was of the sunniest likewise, and 
there "was a roguish twinkle in his black eyes, and 
though his cheeks were brown, his teeth were of the 
whitest. So, as I gave him pence, I determined in- 
wardly, that I would tolerate at least one organ- 
grinder, if he came near where I lived. It is true 
that I had not the remotest idea of where I was 
going to live. 

I walked onwards and onwards, admiring the 
pied cows in the far-off pastures — cows, the white 
specks on whose hides occurred so artistically, that 
one might have thought that the scenic arrangement 
of the landscape had been intrusted to Mr. Birket 
Foster. 

Anon I saw coming towards me a butcher-boy in 
his cart, drawn by a fast -trotting pony. It was a 
light high spring -cart, very natty and shiny, with 
the names and addresses of the proprietors, Messrs. 
Hock, butchers to the royal family, West Deadwood 
— which of the princes or princesses resided at West 
Deadwood, I wonder? — emblazoned on the panels. 
The butcher -boy shone, too, with a suety sheen. 
The joints which formed his cargo were of the hue 
of which an English girl's cheeks should be — pure 
red and white. And the good sun shone upon all. 
The equipage came rattling along at a high trot, the 
butcher squaring his arms and whistling — I could see 
him whistle from afar off. I asked him when he 
neared me, how far it might be to Doleful-hill. 



336 UNDER THE SUN 

4 Good two mile/ quoth the butcher-boy, pulling 
up. 4 Steady, you warmint !' This was to the trotting 
pony. 'But,' he continued, ' you'll have to pass 
Wretchedville first. Lays in a 'ole a little to the 
left, arf a mile on.' 

4 Wretchedville,' thought I; what an odd name! 
1 What sort of a place is it ?' I inquired. 

'W^ell,' replied the butcher -boy; ' it's a lively 
place, a werry lively place. I should say it was 
lively enough to make a cricket burst himself for 
spite : it's so uncommon lively.' And with this enig- 
matical deliverance the butcher -boy relapsed into a 
whistle of the utmost shrillness, and rattled away 
towards Sobbington. 

I wish that it had not been quite so golden an 
afternoon. A little dulness, a few clouds in the sky, 
might have acted as a caveat against Wretchedville. 
But I plodded on and on, finding all things looking 
beautiful in that autumn glow. I came positively on 
a gipsy encampment; blanket tent; donkey tethered 
to a cart-wheel; brown man in a wideawake, ham- 
mering at a tin pot; brown woman with a yellow 
kerchief, sitting crossed-legged, mending brown man's 
pantaloons; brown little brats of Egypt swarming 
across the road, and holding out their burnt-sienna 
hands for largesse, and the regular gipsy's kettle 
swinging from the crossed sticks over a fire of stolen 
furze. Farmer Somebody's poultry simmering in the 
pot, no doubt. Family linen — somebody else's linen 
yesterday — drying on an adjacent bush. Who says 



WRETCHEDVILLE. 337 

that the picturesque is dead? The days of Sir Roger 
de Coverley had come again. So I went on and on ad- 
miring, and down the declivitous road into Wretched- 
ville, and to Destruction. 

Were there any apartments l to let' ? Of course 
there were. The very first house I came to was, as 
regards the parlour-window, nearly blocked up by 
a placard treating of Apartments Furnished. Am I 
right in describing it as the parlo ur- window ? I 
scarcely know; for the front door, with which it was 
on a level, was approached by such a very steep flight 
of steps, that when you stood on the topmost grade it 
seemed as though, with a very slight effort, you could 
have peeped in at the bedroom window, or touched 
one of the chimney-pots ; while as concerns the base- 
ment, the front kitchen — I beg pardon, the breakfast 
parlour — appeared to be a good way above the level 
of the street. The space in the first-floor window not 
occupied by the placard, was filled by a monstrous 
group of wax fruit, the lemons as big as pumpkins, and 
the leaves of an unnaturally vivid green. The window 
below — it was a single-windowed front — served merely 
as a frame for the half-length portrait of a lady in a 
cap, ringlets, and a colossal cameo brooch. The Eyes 
of this portrait were fixed upon me; and before, al- 
most, I had lifted a very small, light knocker, deco- 
rated, so far as I could make out, with the cast-iron 
efligy of a desponding ape, and had struck this 
against a door which, to judge from the amount of 
percussion produced, was composed of bristol-board 



338 UNDER THE SUN. 

highly varnished, the portal itself flew open, and the 
portrait of the basement appeared in the flesh. In- 
deed, it was the same portrait. Downstairs it had 
been Mrs. Primpris looking out into the Wretched- 
ville road for lodgers. Upstairs it was Mrs. Primpris 
letting her lodgings, and glorying in the act. 

She didn't ask for any references. She didn't 
hasten to inform me that there were no children, or 
any other lodgers. She didn't look doubtful, when I 
told her that the whole of my luggage consisted of a 
black bag, which I had left at the Sobbington station. 
She seemed rather pleased than otherwise at the idea 
of the bag, and said that her Alfred should step round 
for it. She didn't object to smoking; and she at once 
invested me with the Order of the Latch-key — a 
latch-key at Wretchedville, ha ! ha ! She farther held 
me with her glittering eye, and I listened like a two- 
years child, while she let me the lodgings for a fort- 
night certain. Perhaps it was less her eye that dazed 
me than her cameo, on which there was, in high relief, 
and on a ground of the hue of a pig's liver, the effigy 
of a young woman with a straight nose and a round 
chin, and a quantity of snakes in her hair. I don't 
think that cameo came from Eome. I think it came 
from Tottenham-court-road. 

She had converted me into a single gentleman 
lodger, of quiet and retired habits — or was I a 
widower of independent means seeking a home in 
a cheerful family? — so suddenly, that I beheld all 
things as in a dream. Thinking, perchance, that the 



WRETCHED VILLE. 3 3 9 



first stone of that monumental edifice, the Bill, could 
not be laid too quickly, she immediately provided me 
with Tea, There was a little cottage-loaf, so hard, 
round, shiny, and compact, that I experienced a well- 
nigh uncontrollable desire to fling it up to the ceiling, 
to ascertain whether it would chip off any portion of 
a preposterous rosette in stucco in the centre, repre- 
senting a sunflower, surrounded by cabbage-leaves. 
This terrible ornament was, by the way, one* of the 
chief sources of my misery at Wretchedville. I was 
continually apprehensive that it would tumble down 
bodily on to the table. In addition to the cottage- 
loaf, there was a pretentious teapot, which, had it been 
of sterling silver, would have been worth fifty guineas, 
but which, in its ghastly gleaming, said plainly c Shef- 
field' and c imposture.' There was a piece of butter in 
a fi shape,' like a diminutive haystack, and with a cow 
sprawling on the top in unctuous plasticity. It was a 
pallid kind of butter, from which with difficulty you 
shaved off adipocerous scales, which would not be per- 
suaded to adhere to the bread, but flew off at tangents, 
and went rolling about an intolerably large teatray, on 
whose papier-mache surface was depicted the death of 
Captain Hedley Yicars. The Crimean sky was inlaid 
with mother-of-pearl, and the gallant captain's face was 
highly enriched with blue-and-crimson foil-paper. As 
for the tea, I don't think I ever tasted such a peculiar 
mixture. Did you ever sip warm catsup sweetened with 
borax ? That might have been something like it. And 
what was that sediment, strongly resembling the sand 



340 UNDER THE SUN. 

at Great Yarmouth, at the bottom of the cup? 1 sat 
down to my meal, however, and made as much play 
with the cottage-loaf as I could. Had the loaf been 
varnished? It smelt and looked as though it had un- 
dergone that process. Everything in the house smelt 
of varnish. I was uncomfortably conscious, too, 
during my repast — one side of the room being all 
window — that I was performing the part of a ' Por- 
trait of the Gentleman in the first floor,' and that 
as such I was c sitting' to Mrs. Lucknow at Number 
Twelve, opposite — I know her name was Lucknow, 
for a brass plate on the door said so — whose own half- 
length effigy was visible in her breakfast - parlour 
window, glowering at me reproachfully because I had 
not taken her first floor, in the window of which was, 
not a group of wax fruit, but a sham alabaster vase 
full of artificial flowers. Every window in "Wretched- 
ville exhibited one or other of these ornaments, 
and it was from their contemplation that I began to 
understand, how it was that the 'fancy-goods' trade 
in the Minories and Houndsditch throve so well. 
They made things there to be purchased by the 
housekeepers of Wretchedville. The presence of Mrs. 
Lucknow at the glass case over the way was becoming 
unbearable, when the unpleasant vision was shut out 
by the appearance of Mrs. Primpris's Alfred, who, 
with his sister Selina, had been sent to Sobbington 
for my bag. Alfred was a boy with a taste for art. 
In the daytime he was continually copying the head 
of a Greek person (sex uncertain) in a helmet, who 



WRETCHEDVILLE. 341 

reminded you equally of a hairdresser's dummy in 
plaster, and of a fireman of the Fire Brigade. He 
used to bring studies of this person, in white, red, and 
black chalk, to me, and expect that I would reward 
him for his proficiency with threepenny-pieces 'to buy 
india-rubber ;' and then Mrs. Primpris would be sure 
to be lurking outside the door, and audibly express- 
ing her wish that some good, kind, gentleman would 
get Alfred into the Blue-Coat School, which she ap- 
peared to look upon as a kind of eleemosynary insti- 
tution in connection with the Royal Academy of Arts. 
I can't help suspecting, from sundry private conversa- 
tions I had with Alfred, that he entertained a pro- 
found detestation for the plaster person in the helmet, 
and for the Fine Arts generally ; but, as he logically 
observed, he was c kep at it,' and c it was no use hol- 
ler in'.' As for his sister Selina, all T can remember of 
her is that one leg of her tucked calico trousers was 
always two inches and a half longer than the other, 
and that for a girl of thirteen she had the most alarm- 
ingly sharp shoulder-blades I ever saw. I always 
used to think when I saw these osseous angularities, 
oscillating like the beams of a marine engine, that 
the next time her piston-rod-like arms moved, the 
scapula? must come through her frock. Mrs. Prim- 
pris was a disciplinarian ; and whenever I heard Se- 
lina plaintively yelping in the kitchen, I felt tolerably 
certain that Mrs. Primpris was correcting her on her 
shoulder-blades with a shoe. 

The shades of evening fell, and Mrs. Primpris 



342 UNDER THE SUN 



brought me in a monstrous paraffin lamp, the flame 
of which wouldn't do anything but lick the glass 
chimney, till it had smoked it to the hue proper to ob- 
serve eclipses by, and then splutter into extinction, emit- 
ting a charnel-house-like odour. After that we tried 
a couple of composites (six to the pound) in green- 
glass candlesticks. I asked Mrs. Primpris if she could 
send me up a book to read ; and she favoured me, per 
Alfred and Selina, with her whole library, consist- 
ing of the Asylum Press Almanac for 1860, two odd 
volumes of the Calcutta Directory; the Brewer and 
Distiller's Assistant ; Julia de Crespigny, or a Winter 
in London; Dunoyer's French Idioms ; and the Reve- 
rend Mr. Huntington's Bank of Faith. I took out my 
cigar-case after this, and began to smoke ; and then I 
heard Mrs. Primpris coughing, and a number of doors 
being thrown wide open. Upon this I concluded that 
I would go to bed. My sleeping apartment — the first 
floor back — was a perfect cube. One side was win- 
dow, overlooking a strip of clay soil hemmed in be- 
tween brick Avails. There were no tombstones yet, 
but if it wasn't a cemetery, why, when I opened the 
window to get rid of the odour of the varnish, did it 
smell like one ? The opposite side of the cube was 
composed of a chest of drawers. I am not imperti- 
nently curious by nature, but, as I was the first-floor 
lodger, I thought myself entitled to open the top long 
drawer, with a view to the bestowal therein of the 
contents of my black bag. The drawer was not 
empty ; but that which it held made me very nervous. 



WRETCHEDVILLE. 343 

I suppose the weird figure I saw stretched out there, 
with pink arms and legs sprouting from a shroud of 
silver paper, a quantity of ghastly auburn curls, and 
two blue glass eyes unnaturally gleaming in the midst 
of a mask of salmon-coloured wax, was Selina's best 
doll; the present, perhaps, of her uncle, who was, 
haply, a Calcutta director, or an Asylum Press Al- 
manac maker, or a brewer and distiller, or a cashier 
in the Bank of Faith. I shut the drawer again hur- 
riedly, and that doll in its silver paper cerecloth 
haunted me all night. 

The third side of my bedroom consisted of chim- 
ney — the coldest, hardest, brightest -looking fireplace 
I ever saw out of Hampton Court Palace guard- 
room. The fourth side was door. I forget into 
which corner was hitched a washhand stand. The 
ceiling was mainly stucco rosette, of the pattern of 
the one in my sitting-room. Among the crazes which 
came over me at this time was one, to the effect that 
this bedroom was a cabin on board ship, and that if 
the ship should happen to lurch, or roll in the trough 
of the sea, I must infallibly tumble out of the door, 
or the window, or into the drawer where the doll was 
- — unless the drawer and the doll came out to me 
— or up the chimney. I think that I murmured 
' Steady,' as I clomb into bed. My couch — an ' Ara- 
bian' one Mrs. Primpris said proudly — seemingly 
consisted of the Logan, or celebrated rocking-stone 
of Cornwall, loosely covered with bleached canvas, 
under which was certain loose foreign matter, but 



344 UNDER THE SUN 

whether composed of flocculi of wool, or of the halves 
of kidney potatoes I am not in a position to state. 
At all events I awoke in the morning veined all 
over like a scagliola column. I never knew, too, be- 
fore, that any blankets were ever manufactured in 
Yorkshire, or elsewhere, so remarkably small and 
thin as the two seeming flannel pocket-handkerchiefs 
with blue-and- crimson edging, which formed part of 
Mrs. Prmxpris's Arabian bed-furniture. Nor had I 
hitherto been aware, as I was when I lay with that 
window at my feet, that the Moon was so very large. 
The orb of night seemed to tumble on me, flat, until 
I felt as though I were lying in a cold frying-pan. 
It was a 'watery moon,' I have reason to think; for 
when I awoke the next morning, much battered with 
visionary conflicts with the doll, I found that it was 
raining cats and dogs. ' 

' The rain,' the poet tells us, ' it raineth every 
day.' It rained most prosaically all that day at 
"Wretchedville, and the next, and from Monday morn- 
ing till Saturday night, and then until the middle of 
the next week. Dear me ! dear me ! how wretched 
I was ! I hasten to declare that I have no kind of 
complaint to make against Mrs. Primpris. Not a flea 
was felt in her house. The cleanliness of the villa 
was so scrupulous as to be distressing. It smelt of 
soap and scrubbing-brush, like a Refuge. Mrs. Prim- 
pris was strictly'honest, even to the extent of inquir- 
ing what I would like to have done with the fat of 
cold mutton-chops, and sending me up antediluvian 



WRETCHEDVILLE. 345 

crusts, the remnants of last week's cottage - loaves, 
with, which I would play moodily at knock-'em- 
downs, using the pepper-caster as a pin. I have 
nothing to say against Alfred's fondness for art. 
India-rubber, to be sure, is apter to smear than to 
obliterate drawings in chalk ; but a threepenny piece 
is not much ; and you cannot too early encourage the 
imitative faculties. And again, if Selina did require 
correction, I am not prepared to deny that a shoe 
may be the best implement, and the bladebones the 
most fitting portion of the human anatomy, for such 
an exercitation. I merely say that I was wretched 
at Wretchedville, and that Mrs. Primpris's apart- 
ments very much aggravated my misery. The usual 
objections taken to a lodging-house are to the effect 
that the furniture is dingy, the cooking execrable, 
the servant a slattern, and the landlady either a cro- 
codile or a tigress. Now my indictment against my 
Wretchedville apartments simply amounts to this: 
that everything was too new. Never were there such 
staring paper-hangings, such gaudily-printed drug- 
gets for carpets, such blazing hearthrugs — one repre- 
senting the Dog of Montargis seizing the murderer 
of the Forest of Bondy — such gleaming fire-irons, 
and such remarkably shiny looking-glasses, with gilt 
halters for frames. The crockery was new, and the 
glue in the chairs and tables was scarcely dry. The 
new veneer peeled off the new chiffonier. The rol- 
ler-blinds to the windows were so new that they 
wouldn't work. The new stair- carpeting used to 



346 UNDER THE SUN 

dazzle my eyes so, that I was always tripping myself 
up; the new oil- cloth in the hall smelt like the 
Trinity House repository for new buoys ; and Mrs. 
Primpris was always full-dressed, cameo brooch and 
all, by nine o'clock in the morning. She confessed, 
once or twice during my stay, that her house was 
not quite ' seasoned.' It was not even seasoned to 
sound. Every time the kitchen-fire was poked, you 
heard the sound in the sitting-room. As to per- 
fumes, whenever the lid of the copper in the wash- 
house was raised, the first-floor lodger was aware of 
the fact. I knew, by the simple evidence of my 
olfactory organs, what Mrs. Primpris had for dinner 
every day. Pork, accompanied by some green escu- 
lent, boiled, predominated. 

When my fortnight's tenancy had expired — I 
never went outside the house until I left it for good 
— and my epic poem, or whatever it was, had more 
or less been completed, I returned to London, and 
had a rare bilious attack. The doctor said it was 
Painter's Colic ; I said at the time that it was disap- 
pointed ambition, for the booksellers had looked very 
ooldly on my poetical proposals; and the managers, 
to a man, had refused to read my play ; but at this 
present writing, I believe the sole cause of my malady 
to have been Wretcheclville. I hope they will pull 
down the villas, and build the jail there, soon, and 
that the rascal convicts will be as wretched as I was. 



THE HOTEL CHAOS. 

To say that Chaos is come again is a tolerably com- 
mon locution for expressing an excessive amount of 
confusion; but there need not be the slightest fear 
of the return of the Hotel Chaos. It can never come 
again. It was too rich of its kind, too peculiar, too 
overwhelming in its characteristics, to bear repetition. 
Among chaotic things it was unique, and, on the 
whole, it may be esteemed a matter for congratula- 
tion that there never could have been by any possi- 
bility but one Hotel Chaos, and that in all human 
probability there never will be another. There are 
limits even to disorder, and the acutest ravings ot 
mania must have their turn. The Hotel Chaos was 
the maddest hostelry ever known, or ever dreamt 
of. It did its work; it reached its consummation; 
it Burst ; and it can be no more restored to its pris- 
tine shape than can one of those paper bags which 
schoolboys innate with their breath until the bags are 
as plump as a balloon ready to start, and then, with 
smart concussion from the palms of their hands, rend 
into irremediable fragments. 

I never enjoyed the felicity of a bed at the Hotel 
Chaos : which, to have been consistent, should have 



348 UNDER THE SUN 

been fitted up, in the way of sleeping accommodation, 
with padded rooms, frequented by laundresses bring- 
ing home nothing but strait- waistcoats as clean linen 
from the wash. A room at the Hotel Chaos ! Bless 
you, such a thing was an infinity of cuts above me, 
and was meat for my masters — marshals of France, 
grand provosts, and similar grandees. I don't think 
they took in anybody lower in rank than a deputy- 
assistant commissary -general, and it is not probable 
that I shall ever attain a grade so exalted. There 
had been, to be sure, a few modest civilians, despic- 
able creatures, with not so much as a solitary ribbon 
of the Legion of Honour among them, who had been 
fortunate enough to obtain apartments at the Chaos, 
before the hotel went hopelessly and stark- star ingly 
mad; and as these contemptible creatures (who were 
mainly Englishmen) were content topay about seventy- 
five per cent more for their board and lodging than 
the grandees were willing to disburse, the landlord— 
a covetous rogue with but scant patriotism in him — 
was naturally reluctant to turn these ignoble, but 
lucrative, customers into the street. Ere long, how- 
ever, a dashing member of the staff of Field-Marshal 
Bombastes Furioso was heard to ask the proprietor 
how long it would be before he put i tout ce tas de 
pekins a la porte' — before he expelled all those cads 
of civilians ; and so shortly afterwards the proprietor 
— really much against the grain, I am willing to be- 
lieve — began to grow insolent to the civilian cads, 
and to hint that their rooms were required for ; Mes- 



THE HOTEL CHAOS. 349 

sieurs les Militaires ;' that General Fusbos couldn't 
wait any longer, that Colonel Grosventre must really 
be accommodated, and that Milord Smith, Count 
Thompson, and Sir Brown must find lodgings else- 
where. Smith, Brown, and Thompson, quiet souls, 
well aware that in war time the toga must cede to 
the tunic, meekly withdrew from the foul and wretched 
garrets where for sums varying from ten to fifteen 
francs a day they had been suffered to hide their 
degraded heads ; but, although ostracised from the 
upper rooms, they were by no means free, financially, 
from the exaction of the Hotel Chaos. It was one of 
the myriad humours of this bedlamite establishment 
that your bill, if you didn't stop in the house, had a 
tendency to grow longer than had been its custom 
when you did stop. But how was a bill possible at 
all, you may ask. Thus. The Hotel Chaos was the 
only place in the maniacal city of Moriah where you 
could get a decent breakfast or dinner, and where 
tolerable coffee, liquors, and cigars could be obtained. 
Moreover, as the chief madmen of Moriah were al- 
ways congregated at the Chaos, and as, in its salle a 
manger and its court-yard, all that was notable and 
worth studying in the way of hallucination, foaming 
at the mouth, homicidal mania, epilepsy, demoniacal 
possession, hysteria, melancholia, kleptomania, hypo- 
chondriasis, dipsomania, and midsummer madness, 
was sure to be visible and audible at all hours of the 
day and night; as, within its walls, there was a per- 
petual narration of tales told by idiots, full of sound 



350 UNDER THE SUN 

and fury, signifying nothing; of visions so wild and 
fantastic, that Ossian read tamely, and Emmanuel 
'Swedenborg flatly afterwards; and of lies so gran- 
diose and so impudent that Marco Polo or Sir John 
Mandeville might have sickened with envy to hear 
them — you were perforce impelled to make of the 
Hotel Chaos a common news-room, exchange, and 
lounge. You breakfasted and dined at the table- 
d'hote; you smoked and took your demi-tasse, or 
your seltzer-and-something, on the terrace overlook- 
ing the court-yard — shaking sometimes in your shoes, 
miserable civilian cads as you were, at the knowledge 
of the close propinquity of Marshal Bombastes and 
General Fusbos, and sometimes of a plumed and em- 
broidered aide-de-camp of the great Emperor Artax- 
omines himself. Thus, you i used' the Hotel Chaos, 
although you had no bed there, and you were always 
heavily in debt to the waiter. If you wanted to pay 
him for your dinner, he had no change; and when 
you had no change — -and nothing to change, per- 
chance, for ready money was apt to run wofully short 
in the mad city of Moriah — he was sure to present a 
bill exhibiting a fabulous back score of breakfasts, 
dinners, demi-tasses, and petits verres, and impetu- 
ously demanded payment. If you demurred, he 
threatened you with the grand provost. He knew 
you to be a miserable cad of a civilian, only fed upon 
sufferance, incessantly watched and followed about 
by the gendarmerie and by police-agents in plain 
clothes, and he also knew that the propriety of your 



THE HOTEL CHAOS. 35 r 

expulsion altogether from Mori ah was debated every 
day by some of the grandees in cocked hats and 
epaulettes. The best thing to do was to conciliate 
the waiter with humble and obsequious phrases, and, 
giving him silver money for himself, promise to pay 
the bill — usually a mere schedule of fictitious items — 
that afternoon. Under those circumstances you were 
tolerably safe ; for in five minutes the head-waiter 
usually forgot all about you. He had dunned some- 
body else successfully, or the still small voice of con- 
science had deterred him from making another attempt 
to fleece you ; or — which is the likeliest hypothesis of 
all — his intermittent fit of madness had come on, and 
he had gone up-stairs to tear his hair, and claw his 
flesh, and gnaw the bedclothes, and howl till he was 
hoarse, according to the afternoon custom of the men 
of Moriah. 

Moriah, I may take occasion to observe, lest I 
should get benighted in the maze of allegory, was, in 
sane parlance, the fortified city of Metz, the head- 
quarters, at the end of the month of July 1870, of the 
Army of the Ehine, of the Imperial Guard of France, 
and of the Emperor Napoleon the Third, who, with 
his young son, the Prince Imperial, his cousin, Prince 
Napoleon, a brilliant staff, and a sumptuous follow- 
ing, were lodged at the Hotel of the Prefecture. 
Marshals Le Bceuf and Bazaine, General de Saint 
Sauveur (the grand provost), General Soleil, com- 
manding the artillery of the Guards, and a glitter- 
ing mob of generals, colonels, and aides-de-camp of 



352 UNDER THE SUN. 

the Guards, the staff, and the line, were at the Hotel 
Chaos. 

But, be it borne in mind that, when I speak of the 
Chaotic Inn, my statement must be taken with a slight 
reservation or allowance. You may be horror-stricken 
at the confession that there were two Hotels Chaos in 
Metz, and that, to this day, I cannot remember with 
exactitude which was which. They were in the same 
street, the Grande Eue Colneyhatchi, I think, exactly 
opposite one another: each with a court-yard, each 
with a terrace, each with head- waiters, who presented 
you with extortionate bills, each full of marshals, 
generals, colonels, and aides-de-camp : in fact, as like 
unto one another as two peas, or the two Dromios, 
or Hippocrates' Twins. One, I am inclined to think 
— but Reason totters on her throne — was called the 
Grand Hotel de Metz. The other — -but my brain 
burns with volcanic fierceness when I strive to recall 
it — was known as the Grand Hotel de 1' Europe. It 
is my firm conviction that, for the major portion of 
the edibles and potables I consumed at the Grand 
Hotel de Metz, I paid the waiter at the Grand Hotel 
de l'Europe, and vice versa. It did not matter much, 
then, for there was a solidarity of insanity between 
them, and both were integral parts — if any integrity 
could be in that which was normally and essentially 
disintegration — of the Hotel Chaos. It matters less 
now; since, for aught we know, both hotels have 
been burnt to the ground, or shattered by bomb- 
shells, and nothing remains within the huge earth- 



THE HOTEL CHAOS. 353 

works of Metz but charred beams and crumbling 
brickwork, and dust and ashes. Perhaps the head- 
waiters at the two caravansaries — I have heard that 
a fierce mutual hatred existed between them— have 
eaten one another. 

Let me strive to embody some fleeting memories 
of that demented time. There is breakfast. We that 
were English in Metz, a feeble folk, continuously- 
snubbed by the military authorities, and harassed by 
the police, and pursuing an arduous vocation under 
all manner of slights, discouragement, and obstacles, 
usually made a rendezvous to breakfast together at 
the same time — about half-past ten. There was canny 
Mr. M'Inkhorn, from the Land o' Cakes, special cor- 
respondent of the ' Bannockburn Journal and Peck 
o' Maut Advertiser/ who, in the performance of his 
duties as a war-scribe, was chronically perturbed in 
mind by the thought that he had left unfinished in 
North Britain a series of statistical articles on the 
Sanitary Condition of Glen M'Whisky. There was 
Mr. Mercutio, once gallant and gay, now elderly and 
portly, who was called Philosopher Mercutio in early 
life, and wrote that celebrated work on the Rationale 
of the Categorical Imperative as correlative to the 
Everlasting Afiirmation of Negation, and who now 
laughed, and gossiped, and drank kirschwasser all 
day long, and wrote war-letters to a High Tory even- 
ing paper all night. He had brought his son with 
him, an ingenuous youth, in a gray tweed suit, who 
was his sire's guide, philosopher, and friend; con- 

AA 



354 UNDER THE SUN 

trolled him gently in the matter of kirschwasser, was 
the profoundest cynic and the shrewdest observer for 
his age I ever met with, and who otherwise, from 
sunrise to sunset, did nothing with an assiduity which 
was perfectly astonishing. There was mild-eyed Mr. 
Sumph, of Balliol, who indited those fiery letters from 
Abyssinia during the campaign, and had a special 
faculty while in Metz for getting arrested as a Prus- 
sian spy. There were a brace of quiet, harmless, 
industrious artists belonging to English illustrated 
newspapers, pilgrims of the pencil, who had wandered, 
in discharge of their functions, to the Crimea, to Italy, 
to India, to China, to the Isthmus of Suez, and to the 
banks of the Chickahominy, and who were now, in 
fear and trembling, making notes in their sketch-books 
of the most salient madnesses of Metz susceptible of 
pictorial treatment. And especially there was Mr. 
O'Goggerdan of the 'Avalanche,' a small man, but of 
a most heroic stomach, and of venturesomeness as- 
tounding. He had been, they said, a colonel of Ame- 
rican Federal cavalry, a Confederate bushwhacker, a 
Mexican guerillero, a Spanish contrabandista, a Gari- 
baldino, one of the Milia di Marsala of course, a Fenian 
centre, and a Pontifical Zouave. He was Dugald 
Dalgetty combined with Luca Fa Presto ; doubling 
the rapier of the practised swordsman with the pen 
of the ready-writer. A wind blowing from Fleet- 
street, London, had brought these strangely-assorted 
people together: the philosopher the elder, the Ox- 
ford fellow, the painter, the soldier of fortune, were 



THE HOTEL CHAOS. 355 

all bent on achieving the same task, and^were all oc- 
casionally partakers of that misery which makes us 
acquainted with such very strange bedfellows. 

When the customary salutations of the morning 
were over, when we had inquired whether any of our 
number had been arrested as spies during the pre- 
ceding evening, and when we had striven to ascertain 
whether there were any news from the front — it was 
just after Saarbrtick — and when we had, as usual, 
been baffled in our attempt, we fell to discussing a 
very substantial breakfast a la fonrchette, to which 
dropped in, between eleven and noon, group after 
group of artists in the great drama, of which the first 
scene had, as yet, been but ill played. It is possible 
that I may be rather understating than overstating 
the fact, when I assume that three-fourths of the 
French people we used to meet every morning at 
breakfast, and who, as a rule, treated us with infinite 
scorn and contumely — it is true that as civilian cads 
we had no business there, and should have been hid- 
ing our heads in squalid auberges suited to our degree 
— are by this time dead and buried, or scattered to 
the four winds of heaven ; in exile, in captivity, or in 
other ruinous and irremediable dispersion.* Of the 
mere bald aspects and trite humours of a French gar- 
rison town, with which most of us who have made 
even a week's trip to the Continent must be familiar, 
I should be ashamed to treat ; and Metz in ordinary 
times had been, I doubt it not, as dull and trite a 

* This paper was written in November 1870. 



356 UNDER THE SUN 

place as its hundred and one congeners among French 
garrisons. A great deal of drumming and a great 
deal of bugling ; much swaggering about streets and 
leering under feminine bonnets on the part of portly 
captains and wasp-waisted lieutenants, and of shift- 
lessly dawdling and futile pavement beating on the 
part of gaby-faced soldiers, not over clean, and with 
an inch and a half of coarse cotton shirt visible between 
the hem of their undress jackets and the waistband 
of their red pantaloons ; much moustache twisting, 
tin-canful of soup carrying, absinthe tippling, and 
halfpenny cigar smoking : these were the most salient 
features of French military life, and they were as well 
known to the majority of educated Englishmen as 
the manners and customs of the metropolitan police. 
But when Metz went mad with the war fever early in 
August 1870, her military guise underwent a devel- 
opment so extensive and so exceptional, that the 
spectator of many strange scenes in many strange 
countries may be warranted in sketching the things 
he saw without being open to the charge of telling a 
thrice-told tale. To our breakfast-table at the Hotel 
Chaos came officers — few of them below ihe rank of 
captain — from every branch of the French military 
service. The Imperial Guard were the most numer- 
ously represented; for at Metz were the imperial 
head-quarters, and the Cent Gardes mounted sentry 
at the Prefecture. Their lieutenant did not conde- 
scend to breakfast with us ; but he frequently deigned 
to take coffee and kirsch on the terrace. I see him 



THE HOTEL CHAOS. 357 



now, a sky-blue giant — I mean that his tunic was sky- 
blue — with a fat, foolish face. For the rest he was 
all epaulettes, and jack -boots, and buckskins, and 
aiguillettes, and buttons, and sword and sash, and 
splendour generally. I used to reckon him up, and 
calculate that at the lowest valuation he could not be 
bought, as he stood, for less than a hundred and fifty 
pounds. His boots alone must have been worth three 
pounds ten. I used, I own, to envy him. To what 
surprising stroke of good luck did he owe his com- 
mission in the cream of the Praetorians; in the Golden 
Guard of Caesar ? Had he been born to greatness ? 
had he achieved it ? or had greatness been thrust 
upon him in consequence of his breadth of chest and 
length of limb ? What a position ! Here was a fortu- 
nate youth, obviously not more than five-and-twenty 
years of age, who was privileged to mount guard on 
Caesar's staircase, and before the curtains of the al- 
coves of the empress. He had been at all the grand 
Tuileries balls, at the state ceremonies in the Great 
Hall of the Louvre, at the imperial hunts at Fontaine- 
bleau and Compiegne. The faces of half the kings in 
Europe must have been familiar to him ; and as for 
princes, princesses, senators, members of the Institute 
and Grands Croix of the Legion of Honour, they must 
have been to his sated vision the smallest of small deer. 
Yet here was this ambrosial creature — this happy 
combination of the Apollo Belvedere and Shaw the 
Life Guardsman— for I am sure that he was as brave 
as he was beautiful — sipping his coffee and kirsch, 



358 UNDER THE SUX. 

and smoking his cigar, as though he had been an or- 
dinary mortal. And — no ; my olfactory nerves did 
not deceive me : the cigar was a halfpenny one, a 
veritable Petit Bordeaux of the Kegie. What has 
become of that gay and gallant Colossus by this time? 
It is some satisfaction to have the conviction that his 
corpse is not entombed in some dreadful trench in 
the blood-drenched fields of Alsace or Lorraine, for 
the Cent Gardes did not fight. After Sedan, the 
corps being abolished by a hard-hearted republican 
government, these sumptuous but expensive Jani- 
saries retired into private life. By the way, what 
became of the real Turkish Janisaries ? They were 
not all massacred by the Sultan Mahmoud ; some few 
escaped. What became of those Mamelukes who were 
not cut to pieces by the troops of Mehemet Ali ? 
What would become of our Beefeaters, if a cruel 
House of Commons declined to vote the miscellaneous 
estimate necessary for their support? What becomes 
of the supernumeraries when the Italian Opera-house 
closes — the men with the large flat faces, sphinx-like 
in their impassibility, the large hands, the larger feet, 
and the legs on which the c tights' are always in loose 
wrinkles, and which are frequently bandy ? There is 
a strange faculty of absorption and ingulfment in 
life. There are whole races of people who seem to 
4 duck under,' as it were, and remain quietly and com- 
fortably submarine, while the great ocean overhead 
moans and struggles, or is lashed to frenzy in infinite 
surges. Some of these days, perchance, I sball meet a 



THE HOTEL CHAOS. 359 

marker at billiards, or a c putter-up' in a bowling alley, 
an assistant at a hairdresser's, or a model in a life 
school, who may casually mention the fact that once 
upon a time he was a Cent Garde. Why not ? I met 
a Knight of Malta in Spain, who was travelling in 
dry sherries ; and I have heard of an ex-Dominican 
monk who at present follows the lively profession of 
clown to a circus. I have been aware of a baronet 
who earned his living as a photographer, and an un- 
frocked archdeacon who sold corn and coals on com- 
mission. 

They say that in the Prussian army every com- 
missioned officer below the rank of major is bound 
to perform every day, in addition to his military 
duties, and ere ever he can think of recreation, a 
given task of serious study, precisely as though he 
w T ere a schoolboy. He must draw some map, plan, 
or elevation, solve some problem in military mathe- 
matics, make an abridgment or an analysis of a por- 
tion of some technical work, or write some c theme ' 
upon a given subject — say the causes of the Seven 
Years' War, the commissariat system of the Tenth 
Legion, or the amount of historical truth in the 
story of the battle of the Lake Kegillus, To the 
enforcement of such an unbending course of mental 
as well as physical discipline the Prussian army may 
owe no inconsiderable portion of the success which 
has lately attended its operations in the field. Look- 
ing back upon the Hotel Chaos, and the huge camp 
of which it was the centre, I cannot help thinking 



360 UNDER THE SUN. 

that a little daily schooling after the Prussian manner 
would have done the paladins of Gaul an immensity 
of good. An hour's history, an hour's geography, 
an hour's mathematics a day would have been scarcely 
felt by the multitude of officers who, their slight 
regimental duties at an end, were privileged, or 
rather condemned, for the remainder of the twenty- 
four hours, to do nothing but eat, drink, smoke, 
dawdle about the courtyard and the streets, and 
babble. Of female society, to refine or to amuse 
them, there was none, for the burgesses of Metz, a 
prudent race, so soon as ever the vanguard of the 
Grand Army appeared in sight, had locked up all 
their daughters, and seemingly sent all their pretty 
servant-maids home to their mothers. With a bright 
exception or two, the womanhood of Metz were about 
as engaging in aspect as Sycorax, mother of Caliban. 
There was a large and handsome theatre; but the 
company had been dispersed, and old ladies and little 
schoolgirls sat in the stalls and on the stage all day 
long scraping lint. The two billiard- tables in the 
place had speedily collapsed. Of one, the Third 
Chasseurs cut the cloth with their cues, and de- 
clining to pay for the damage, the proprietor closed 
the entire concern in a huff. I think some of the 
tables must have been let out as beds ; at all events, 
the sound of the clicking of balls grew fainter every 
day, while that of babbling grew louder. It was the 
babbling that drove the Grand Army mad. It was 
the infinite babble that brought about Chaos. Of 



THE HOTEL CHAOS. 361 

golden silence there was none ; of silvery speech lit- 
tle. It was the age of bronze and brass swagger and 
braggadocio, mouthed by copper captains and smock- 
faced sous-lieutenants, who, but a fortnight before, 
had been schoolboys at St. Cyr. It would have been 
better for them to be at school . still. Poor lads, I 
see them now, with their brand-new uniforms, which 
they were never tired of admiring when they could 
get near a mirror ; the fresh lace glittering on collar 
and cuffs; the buttons scarce freed from the tissue- 
paper in which they had been wrapped; the first 
sheen upon the sword- scabbard ; the varnish hardly 
dry on the belts, and in their bright boyish eyes the 
first exultation born of independence, of the con- 
sciousness of being men — of the rapture of the com- 
ing strife. Poor lads ! poor lads ! I hear their loose 
and idle talk, their vain boastings, their complacent 
disparagement of the Prussians, ' mangeurs de chou- 
croute,' forsooth, whom they were going to c eat' 
without pepper or salt. One might have fancied 
Maffio Orsini and the rest gaily defying Donna 
Lucrezia at Venice. But what said that Borgia 
woman in the end? ' You gave me a ball at Venice; 
I return it by a supper at Ferrara;' and then the 
lugubrious chant arose, Nisi Dominus aedificat Do- 
mum, and the seven monks with the seven coffins 
appeared in the doorway of the brilliant banqueting- 
chamber. The answer to the defiance at Metz was 
at Wissembourg, at Woerth, and in the bloody 
shambles below Sedan. When I think upon these 



362 UNDER THE SUN. 

lads now, it is as though I had been down to a 
charnel-house, and lived among corpses; and were I 
to meet one of the babblers of the Hotel Chaos in 
the street, I should take him for a ghost. 

Babbling, continual babbling, made the warriors 
dry ; and it is not libellous, I trust, to hint that the 
army at Metz, ere the first tidings of discomfiture 
came, had grown to be — for Frenchmen, who in old 
times had a repute for temperance — a drunken army. 
Absinthe, kirsch, and cognac tippling went on all day 
and nearly all night at the Chaos, and the dissipation 
engendered by sheer idleness among the officers was 
not slow to spread among the rank and file, who, in 
their cups, not only babbled, but brawled. For the 
rest, there was Chaos outside as well as inside the 
hotels. The tradespeople of the town were doing a 
roaring business. Wholesale traders could sell as 
much meat, flower, wine, and forage to the govern- 
ment as ever they could supply; and retail vendors 
could scarcely keep pace with the demand for flannel 
shirts, potted meats, sardines, sausages, razors, and 
other cutlery ; railway - rugs, mattresses, canteens, 
pipes, cigar-cases, and other camp luxuries and cam- 
paigning comforts. The officers had all received 
their 4 entree en campagne' — a donation of so many 
hundred francs, allotted at the commencement of war 
— and were never tired of shopping. They bought 
everything, except books. The courtyard of the 
Chaos used to be littered with packing-cases, kegs, 
sacks, packages, and tin cans, the private stores of 



THE HOTEL CHAOS. 363 

the Grand Arm}'. Vividly do I remember a most 
dashing turn-out belonging to General Soleil, of the 
artillery — a break, with the general's name and titles 
conspicuously painted on it, and which was as hand- 
some as ever paint and varnish, wheels of a bright scar- 
let, electro-silvered lamps and fittings, could make it. 
Every afternoon the general, with a select party of 
epauletted and decorated friends, used to take a 
drive about the town in this imposing vehicle, to 
which were attached four splendid gray Percheron 
horses, with harness of untanned leather. And then, 
a change of head-quarters being imminent, the break 
took in cargo for active service. Truffled goose-liver 
pies from Strasbourg, andouillettes from Troyes, pigs' 
feet from Sainte Menehould, green chartreuse and 
dry curagoa, fine champagne cognac, Huntley and 
Palmer's biscuits, Allsopp's pale ale — the capacity of 
the break had stomach for all these goodies, to say 
nothing of boxes of cigars in such numbers, that, as 
you passed the break, you caught ambrosial whiffs, 
reminding you equally of the cedars of Lebanon and 
Mr. Carrera's tobacco-shop. I wonder who ate and 
drank all these dainties? Prince Frederick Charles, 
Bismark the omnivorous, or Hans Gobbell, full piivate 
in the Uhlans ? 

And so they went on in their madness, growing* 
madder every day, and doing scarcely anything, as 
it subsequently turned out, to put the Grand Army 
in real fighting trim. The noise and hubbub, the 
babbling and boasting of the Chaos, became at last 



364 UNDER THE SUN 

so intolerable, that I was fain to wander away, far 
from the revellers, far from the great Carnival of 
Insanity — down by the river banks, anywhere out of 
Bedlam, where there was some stillness and peace. 
Very often, late at night, I have crossed the bridge, 
and paced the broad esplanade before the Prefecture. 
A great silken banner floated over the roof; two vol- 
tigeurs of the guard stood sentry by the gateway. 
From time to time dusty couriers would gallop up 
to the portals. Dragoon horses were picketed to the 
railings ; and officers and orderlies would emerge, and 
mount, and spur away in hottest haste. Caesar was 
there, Caesar and the chiefs of the legions. Mine eyes 
were wont to sweep the long lines of windows, and 
wonder which of the brilliantly-lit rooms could be his. 
That upper chamber, perhaps, where the light burned 
so steadily and so late. There, I thought, at least 
were sanity, sagacity, foresight, and a wise prescience 
of possible disaster. In that upper chamber was the 
cold, calm, long-headed, imperturbable man who, 
nineteen years before, on the night when he made 
that coup d'etat which gave him an empire, had sat 
with his feet on the fender in his room at the Elysee, 
slowly puffing his cigarette, and to all the remon- 
strances and the objections of the timid and the half- 
hearted, gave for answer, c Let my orders be exe- 
cuted!' Nineteen years ago! It seemed but yester- 
day since I had stood in the Faubourg St. Honore, 
looking at the brightly illumined windows of the 
Elysee, and wondering which was the room of Louis 



THE HOTEL CHAOS. 365 

Napoleon Bonaparte. He was the same man, no 
doubt, now, at Metz, as in the days when he put 
down liberty, equality, and fraternity by means of 
musketry — the same cold, calm, resolute Thinker and 
Doer, who wanted only his 'orders executed.' I had 
seen him twice at the railway- station, and in the 
cathedral of Metz. He was not, they said, in very 
good health, and walked feebly. But he had always* 
been somewhat shaky as regards the lower limbs. 
The mind was still of crystal, the will of iron, no 
doubt. 

Error, delusion; and that which may be termed 
the deadest of sells generally! There must have been 
ten thousand times more Chaos, more hallucination, 
delusion, and delirium in that room at the Prefecture 
in August 1870 than at the Hotel Chaos itself. Now 
the Prussians have got into Metz, I may pay another 
visit to the mad city and the madder hotels. But I 
shall go in disguise, with green spectacles and a false 
nose ; for Metz must be in a frightful state of im- 
pecuniosity by this time, and, pricked by the javelins 
of scarcity, the waiters may make such fearful de- 
mands on me for bygone — and fictitious — scores, 
that a life's earnings might not suffice to discharge 
the prodigious bill. They would expect me to pay 
the debts of the dead ; and how many of the lunatics 
who babbled in the courtyard must be by this time 
cold and silent ! 



THE IDLE LAKE. 

He who is acquainted with the Idle Lake should be 
thoroughly versed in the topography of mythical 
localities — should be familiar with the Bower of Bliss, 
the House of Fame, and the Cave of Despair ; with 
Doubting Castle, Vanity Fair, and the Valley of the 
Shadow; with the Debatable Land and the Islands 
of the Blest ; with Armida's Garden, and that fear- 
fully beautiful Arbour of Proserpine, where nothing 
but that which was noxious grew. All these legen- 
dary regions should strengthen in the beholder the 
love and wonderment which, as a confirmed lotus- 
eater, an inveterate truant, and an incomgible slug- 
gard, he should feel for the Idle Lake. 

It is situated — anywhere ; and why not in Fairy- 
land ? Why should I not chronicle its bearings thus ? 
Once upon a time, a certain Sir Cymochles, a mailed 
knight certainly, who had the privilege of the entree 
.at Arthur's Court on levee days, whatever the privi- 
lege of the entree mav mean, but otherwise of no 



'O 



may 



very bright repute, was wandering up and down 
' miscellaneously' (a common practice in Faery), ac- 
companied by one Atin, a person of unquestionably 
bad character, and in quest of another chivalrous 



THE IDLE LAKE. 367 



person. Light Sir Guyon, with, the wicked intent 
him to kill and slay. Sir Cymochles, on this feloni- 
ous errand bent, chanced to come to a river, and, 
moored by the bank thereof, what should he discern 
but a little c gondelay,' or gondola, spick and span, 
shining like a new pin, and so trimly bedecked with 
boughs and cunningly woven arbours, that the tiny 
cabin at the stern looked like a floating forest. In 
this delightful wherry there sat a lady fair to see, 
gaily dressed, and with a quantity of wild flowers in 
her hair. She was seemingly of a frivolous and irre- 
verent temperament, and (the legends say) sat in 
the gondola grinning like a Cheshire cat. When she 
ceased to grin, she giggled, or hummed a refrain from 
some idle ditty. Now Sir Cymochles was desirous 
of passing to the other side of the river, and he asked 
the giggling lady if she would give him a cast across. 
Said the lady tittering, 4 As welcome, Sir Knight, as 
the flowers in May;' but she was not so ready to 
oblige Atin : stoutly, indeed, refusing him boat-room. 
Possibly she doubted his capacity to trim the boat 
properly; or haply she thought that he could not 
pay the ferry fee. So Atin was, like Lord Ullin in 
the ballad, ' left lamenting' on the shore, and Sir 
Cymochles, with the grinning lady, went on a rare 
cruise. Away slid the shallow ship, ' more swift 
than swallows skim the liquid sky ;' but the behaviour 
of the merry mariner on the voyage was, I regret to 
say, most improper. She possessed a whole store- 
house of droll anecdotes, and while she told them she 



3 68 UNDER THE SUN 

laughed till the tears rolled clown her pretty naughty 
face. It is certain that she ' chaffed' Sir Cymochies, 
and I am very much afraid that she tickled him; 
but he was rather pleased than otherwise with 4 her 
light behaviour and loose dalliance. ' Her name, she 
said, was Phaedria. The inland sea, from which the 
river ran, and on whose bosom the gondelay was 
floating, was named, she remarked, the Idle Lake. 

How the pair came at last to an island, waste and 
void, that floated in the midst of that great lake ; 
how the laughing lady conducted the bemused knight 
to a chosen plot of fertile land, c amongst wide oases 
set, like a little nest ;' how in that painted oasis there 
was c no tree whose branches did not bravely spring, 
no branch on which a fine bird did not sit;' how she 
fed his eyes and senses with false delights ; how she 
led him to a shady vale, and laid him down on a 
grassy plain ;^how he — 0, idiotic knight! — took off 
his helmet, and laid his disarmed head in her lap; 
how she, as he sunk into slumber, lulled him with a 
wondrously beautiful love lay, in which she sang of 
' the lily, lady of the flow ring field,' and of ' the fleur 
de lys, her lovely paramour ;' how, subsequently, 
steeping with strong narcotics the eyelids of that 
bamboozled knight, she left him snoring, and hied 
her to her gondelay again: and how eventually she, 
plying at the Wapping Old Stairs of Faery, like a 
jolly, wicked young water- woman as she was, picked 
up Sir Guyon, and him inveigled to the Idle Island 
in that Idle Lake; and how there was a terrific 



THE IDLE LAKE. 369 



broadsword combat of two about that ' ladye debon- 
naire' — are not all these things written in the chro- 
nicle of the land which never was — in the Faerie 
Queene of Edmund Spenser ? If you be wise, you 
will take the marvellous poem with you as your only 
travelling companion the next time you journey to 
the Idle Lake. 

I am not habitually idle. I cannot afford it. 
Highly as 1 appreciate the delight of doing nothing, 
of lying in bed and being fed with a spoon, or of 
eating peaches from the wall with my hands in my 
pockets, like Thomson, I am yet constrained, as a 
rule, to work for a certain number of hours in the 
course of every day or night, in order to obtain a 
certain quantity of household bread. I have been 
wandering these many years past in a wilderness of 
work, not unrelieved, however, by occasional oases. 
I remember them all, and dwell on the remembrance 
of them with infinite delight; even as that stolid 
wretch in hodden gray, tramping the treadmill's in- 
tolerable stairs, may dwell upon that soft and happy 
Sybarite time he passed after he was so lucky as to 
find the gentleman's gold watch and chain in the 
gentleman's pocket, and before he was c wanted' by 
the myrmidons of a justice which would take no 
denial, and stigmatised his treasure trove as plunder, 
and his lucky find as an act of larceny. A jovial 
time he had: all tripe and dominoes, and shag to- 
bacco, and warm ale. It was an oasis in his desert 
life of walking about in search of something to steal ; 

BB 



37 o UNDER THE SUN 

and although there are poets and philosophers who 
maintain that the memory of happier days is a sor- 
row's crown of sorrow, I have always been of a con- 
trary opinion ; holding that, as hope springs eternal 
in the human breast, a man is seldom so miserable 
but that, if he has been already happy, he cherishes 
the aspiration of being happy again. He may be con- 
juring up visions of future tripe and warm ale, more 
succulent and more stimulating than ' ever : that 
tramping man in hodden gray. 

I am mindful of an oasis in Hampshire, and of one 
in Surrey ; of a lotus-garden (where I over-ate myself 
once) in an island in the Adriatic, and of a Valley of 
Poppies in North Africa. I know a bank in Anda- 
lusia on which I have reclined, pleasantly yawning, 
and drawing idle diagrams with my walking-stick in 
the sands of time at my feet. I know a cascade, far, 
far up in the mountains of Mexico, among the silver 
mines, the silvery plashing of whose down-come rings 
in the ear of my soul now, drowning the actual and 
prosaic lapping of the water 'coming in' at Number 
Nine, next door. I am braced up tight between the 
shafts, blinkers block my eyes, and a cruel bit chafes 
my mouth, while those tearing wheels behind me seem 
pressing on my heels, and ever and anon the smack- 
ing whip of the driver scathes my sides ; but do you 
think I forget the paddock in which I kicked up my 
heels, or resting my nose on the top of the fence, 
calmly contemplated the hacks on the highway, 
bridled and bitted, pursued by wheels, and quivering 



THE IDLE LAKE. 371 



under the whipcord ? Do you think that I forget the 
Idle Lake? 

I had been to the wars when I came upon it. It 
was an ugly war in which I was concerned, a desul- 
tory, unsatisfactory, semi-guerilla warfare, in the 
Italian Tyrol. Our commander was a famous Hero, 
but his troops were, to use the American expression, 
'a little mixed,' and I am afraid that in several of the 
encounters in which we were engaged we ran away. 
We got scarcely anything to eat, and we slept more 
frequently in the open air than under a roof. It was 
a campaign performed by snatches, and interspersed 
with armistices; and now and again I used to come 
down out of the mountains, ragged, dirty, hungry, 
demoralised, and ' exceeding fierce,' and journey to 
Milan for letters, money, and clean linen, to have a 
warm bath, and enjoy a little civilisation. I am afraid 
that the guests at the Hotel Cavour, in the capital of 
Lombarcly, formed anything but a favourable opinion 
of my manners; still, if I did nearly swallow my 
spoon as well as my soup, and occasionally seize a 
mutton cutlet by the shank, and gnaw it wolfishly, 
where was the harm? It was so Ions: since I had 
had a decent dinner ; nor did I know, when I got 
back to the mountains, when I might get another. 

It was on one of these expeditions to Milan that 
Eugenius Mildman and I struck up a friendship. He 
was as mild as his name ; a beaming, pious, gush- 
ing, amiable creature, as innocent as a lamb, as brave 
as a lion — I marked his conduct once in a battle, from 



372 UNDER THE SUN 

which, with the prudence of a non-combatant camp- 
follower, I timeously retreated — and as affectionate 
as a young gazelle. I wish they would keep such 
exemplary Englishmen as Mildman's race in Eng- 
land ; but the good fellows have a strange fancy for 
wasting their sweetness on the desert air of foreign 
countries ; they do good at Florence, and blush to 
find it fame at Malaga ; they act the part of the Man 
of Ross in Norway, and their right hand knoweth not 
what their left hand doeth at Smyrna ; they enrich 
Thebes and beautify Tadmor in the Wilderness ; and, 
with deplorable frequency, and in the prime of life, 
they die of low fever at Damascus. Mildman was just 
the kind of charitable soul to die at Damascus, uni- 
versally regretted, yet with a life wasted, somehow, in 
good deeds, done at the wrong time, in the wrong 
place, for the benefit of the wrong kind of people. He 
was beautifully purposeless when I met him ; was un- 
decided as to whether he should publish a series of 
translations from the Sarmatian anthology, in aid of 
the Polish emigration, or raise a loan in furtherance 
of public (denominational) education in the republic 
of Guatimozin. Meanwhile he had been fighting a 
little with Garibaldi. I need scarcely add that he 
was a spiritualist and a homceopathist, and that he 
occasionally spoke, not in the strongest terms of cen- 
sure, of the community of Oneida Creek, the Aga- 
pemone, the followers of Johanna Southcote, and the 
Unknown Tongues. It was a toss up, I used to warn 
Mildman, between La Trappe and Colney Hatch for 



THE IDLE LAKE. 373 



him. 'Do something practical,' I used to say to 
Mildman. 'Pay a premium to a stockbroker, and 
spend a year in his office. Article yourself to a 
sharp solicitor. Enlist in the Sappers and Miners. 
You have plenty of money : take chambers in St. 
James's, and discount bills at sixty per cent. Make 
a voyage to Pernambuco before the mast. Go in for 
the realities.' But he wouldn't ; and I am afraid 
that he will die at Damascus, universally regretted, 
and that his courier will run away with his dressing- 
case and his circular notes. 

I shall be ever grateful to Eugenius Mildman, for 
he made me acquainted with the Idle Lake. It was 
during one of my expeditions to Milan, and broiling 
summer weather. The Scala was closed ; and at the 
Canobbiana (the operatic succursal to the grander 
theatre) the tenor had a wooden leg, the 'prima 
donna assoluta was fifty-three years of age, and the 
c prima ballerina' was slightly humped in the back, 
and was endowed with but a single eye ; so, as you 
may imagine, the Canobbiana entertainments did not 
draw very crowded audiences. The garden of the 
usually pleasant Caffe Cova, where we dined (chiefly 
on macaroni and fried intestines) c al fresco,' had 
become a nuisance, owing to the continual presence 
of noisy patriots, smoking bad ' Cavours,' and screech- 
ing about the incapacity of General de la Marmora, 
and the shameful tergiversation of the Emperor Na- 
poleon the Third in the matter of the Dominio Yeneto. 
The caricatures in the Spirito Folletto were wofully 



374 UNDER THE SUN 

stupid, and altogether Milan had become socially un- 
inhabitable. Mildman and I determined to start on 
a ramble. We got to Chiavenna, and so, by Vieo 
Soprano, to St. Moritz. Thence, hiring a little ' cal- 
escino,' a picturesque kind of one-horse chaise, we 
made Samaden, and for three weeks or so dodged in 
and out of the minor Alpine passes — the Bernina, the 
Tonale, and so forth — taking to mule-back when the 
roads were impracticable for the c calescino,' and com- 
ing out into the Tyrol at last somewhere near Storo, 
where we rejoined our famous Hero and his red- 
shirted army. After another skirmish or so — we 
called them battles — there was another armistice, 
and back I came to Milan, but this time alone. I 
shook hands with Mildman, and the last I saw of 
him was his slender figure bestriding a mule in a 
mountain gorge, and in the setting sun. He was de- 
parting in quest of windmills to charge, or forlorn 
Dulcineas to rescue ; he was bound for Damascus, or 
the 'ewigkeit.' What do I know about it? Fare- 
well, excellent Quixotic man. 

But I went back to Mediolanum ; and for the 
next eight weeks I was continually running back- 
wards and forwards to the Idle Lake. I had grown 
to love it. I loved even the quaint old Lombard 
town from which the lake derives, not its sobriquet, 
but its real name. There are two of the dirtiest and 
clearest hotels in Northern Italy in that town ; yet I 
was fond of them both. There are as many evil 
smells in the town as in Cologne ; yet the imperfect 



THE IDLE LAKE. 



375 



drainage, and the too apparent presence of decaying 
animal and vegetable matter in the market-place, did 
not affect me. Was I not on the shore of the great, 
calm, blue lake, with the blue sky above, and the 
blue mountains in the distance, and the whole glo- 
rious landscape shot with threads of gold by the 
much embroidering sun? I had made the acquaint- 
ance of a Milanese banker who had a charming villa 
on the opposite side of the lake, say at Silva Selvag- 
gia. He had a pretty yacht, in which many a time 
we made voyages on the idle expanse, voyages which 
reminded me of the cruise of Sir Cymochles. My 
host was an enthusiastic fresh-water sailor, so much 
so that the lake boatman used to call him, ' II Signore 
della Vela.' He was perpetually splicing his main- 
brace, and reefing his topsail. Sail ! we did nothing 
but sail : that is to say when we were not breakfast- 
ing, or dining, or smoking, or drinking l asti spu- 
mante,' or dozing, or playing with a large French 
poodle that was rated on the books of the yacht, and 
I think did more work than any of the crew (one 
man, very like Fra Diavolo in a check shirt, and 
without shoes and stockings, and a boy who played 
the guitar), for he was incessantly racing from the 
bow to the stern, and barking at the passing boats. 
We spent at least eight hours out of the twenty -four 
on the water ; and when there was a dead calm we 
lay to and went to sleep. At breakfast time the Per- 
severanza, the chief journal of Lombardy, came to 
hand, and our hostess would read out the telegrams 



376 UNDER THE SUN 

for our edification. After that we bade the Perseve- 
ranza go hang, and strolled down towards the yacht. 
I never read anything, I never wrote anything, I 
never thought of anything, while I was floating on 
the Idle Lake, save of what a capital thing it would 
be to be idle for ever. 

In our boating excursions we frequently landed 
at different points on the lake, and called upon people. 
They were always glad to see us, and to entertain us 
with fruit, wine, cigars, sonatas on the pianoforte (if 
there were ladies present), and perfectly idle conver- 
sation. I never yet learnt the 'nice conduct of a 
clouded cane ;' but I think that I acquired, during 
my sojourn on the Idle Lake, the art of twirling a 
fan, and of cutting paper. Had I stayed long enough 
I might have learned to whistle : that grand accom- 
plishment of the perfect idler. By degrees I became 
conscious that my visiting acquaintance was extend- 
ing among a very remarkable set of people ; and that 
nearly everybody occupying the dainty palazzi and 
trim little villas nestling among the vines and oranges 
and olives of the Idle Lake was Somebody. It will be 
no violation of confidence, I hope, and no ungrateful 
requital of hospitality, to hint that at Bella Riviera 
to the north-east was situated the charming country 
house of Madame la Princesse Hatzoff, the consort, 
indeed, of the well-known General Adjutant and 
Grand Chamberlain to his Imperial Majesty the Tsar 
of All the Russias. M. le Prince resides on his exten- 
sive estates in the government of Tamboff. Some say 



THE IDLE LAKE. 377 



that he is sojourning in a yet remoter government, 
that of Tobolsk in Siberia, where he is occupied in 
mining pursuits, in the way of rolling quartz stone in 
the wheelbarrow to which he, as a life convict, is 
chained. The Princess Hatzoff passes her winters 
either in Paris or Florence, her springs in England, 
her autumns at Homburg or Baden, and her summers 
on the Idle Lake. She is enormously rich, although 
M. le Prince, during their brief wedded life, did his 
best to squander the splendid fortune she brought 
him. She is growing old now ; her clustering ring- 
lets — she was renowned for her ringlets — are silvery 
white ; her shoulders are arched, and her hands 
tremble ominously as she holds her cards at piquet ; 
but her complexion is still exquisitely clear, and she 
is not indebted to art for the roses on her cheeks. 
Her feet are deliciously small and shapely, and she is 
fond of exhibiting them, in their open-worked silk 
stockings, and their coquettish little slippers with the 
high heels and the pink rosettes. Forty years ago 
you used to see waxen models, coloured to the life, 
of those feet (with the adjoining ankles), ay, and of 
those half-paralysed hands, in the shops of the Palais 
Royal and Regent-street, and the Great Moskaia at 
Petersburg. Forty years ago her portraits, in half a 
hundred costumes and a whole hundred attitudes, 
were to be found in every printseller's window in 
Europe. Forty years ago she was not Madame la 
Princesse Hatzoff, but Mademoiselle Marie Fragioli, 
the most famous opera-dancer of her age. The world 



378 UNDER THE SUN 

has quite forgotten her, but I doubt whether she has 
as completely forgotten the world : nay, I fancy that 
in her sumptuous retreat she sometimes rages, and is 
wretched at the thought that age, decrepitude, and 
her exalted rank compel her to wear long clothes, 
and that in the airiest of draperies she can no longer 
spring forward to the footlights, night after night, to 
be deafened by applause, and pelted with bouquets, 
and to find afterwards at the stage-door more bou- 
quets, with diamond bracelets for holders, and reams 
of billet-doux on pink note-paper. Those triumphs, 
for her, are all over. They are enjoyed by sylphs as 
fair, as nimble, and as caressed as she has been ; and 
when she reads of their successes in the newspapers 
a bitter sickness comes across her. What artificer 
likes to reflect upon his loss of competency in his art ? 
Are retired ambassadors, are generals hopelessly on 
half-pay, are superannuated statesmen, or the head- 
masters of public schools, who have retired on hand- 
some pensions, so very happy, think you? Not so, 
perchance. Ambition survives capacity very often. 
The diplomatist clings to his despatch-bag, the soldier 
to his baton of command, the minister to his red box, 
the pedant to his rod, the actor to his sock and bus- 
kin or his comic mask, long after the verdict of su- 
perfluity has been delivered ; long after the dread 
fiat of inefficiency has gone forth — the fiat proclaim- 
ing that the bellows are burned, that the lead is con- 
sumed of the fire, and that the founder worketh in 
vain. 



THE IDLE LAKE. 379 

All round the coasts of the Idle Lake there were 
retired celebrities. The district was a kind of pro- 
sperous Patmos, a St. Helena tenanted by voluntary 
exiles, a jovial Cave of Adullani. Here vegetated an. 
enriched director of promenade concerts ; there en- 
joyed his sumptuous 'otium' the ex-proprietor of 
dwarfs and giants, of learned pigs and industrious 
fleas ; and in yonder Swiss chalet lived a hon-tamer, 
much famed on the Idle Lake for his proficiency in 
breeding rabbits. Millionnaire patentees of cough 
lozenges, bronchitic wafers, anti-asthmatical cigar- 
ettes, universal pills, and Good Samaritan ointments, 
abounded on the Lake ; together with a group of 
wealthy veteran tenors, baritones, and bassi, several 
Parisian restaurateurs and cafe keepers who had real- 
ised large fortunes ; a contractor of one of the Rhine 
watering-place gambling tables ; many affluent linen- 
drapers and court milliners, and an English ex-butcher 
from Bond-street, as rich as Croesus. All who were 
out of debt, and had nothing to grumble at, seemed 
to have gathered themselves together on these shores, 
leading a tranquil, dozy, dawdling kind of existence, 
so that you might have imagined them to be partakers 
before their time of the delights of some Eastern Ely- 
sium, and to be absorbed in the perpetual contempla- 
tion of Buddha. 

But my days of relaxation on the banks of the 
Idle Lake came, with that autumn, to an end; and 
away I went into the 'ewigkeit/ always into the 
'ewigkeit/ to be tossed about in more wars and 



380 UNDER THE SUN 



rumours of wars, and rebellions and revolutions. 
For years I have not set eyes upon the Idle Lake; 
but I often dream of it, and puzzle myself to de- 
termine whether it is situated somewhere between 
the Lake of Garda and the Lake of Como. But that 
there is such a Lake, and that it is gloriously Idle, I 
am very certain. 



POSTE RESTANTE. 

There are sermons in stones; but how many in 
letters ! It matters little what may be within them. 
I have a whole batch now before me, which I do not 
intend ever to open; and one, I know by the post- 
mark, is fifteen years old. There is quite enough 
interest for me in their envelopes and their super- 
scriptions, in their crests and stamps, in the blots 
and the scratches they have picked up on their way. 
For a letter can, no more than a man, get through 
the world without some rubs, often of the hardest. 
Here is a dainty little pink thing of an envelope, 
longer than it is broad — a flimsy brick from the 
temple of love, shot away as rubbish long ago. It is 
directed in the beautifulest little Italian hand — so 
small that the effigy of her most gracious Majesty 
on the stamp might be, by comparison, the portrait 
of the sovereign of Brobdingnag. But, woe is me, 
that careless postman ! The little letter, ere ever it 
reached me, tumbled into the mud. Dun brown 
splashes deface its fair outside. The mud is dry as 
dust now, but not dustier or drier than the memories 
which the envelope awakens. 

Those droll dogs of friends you knew once were 



382 UNDER THE SUN. 

addicted to sending you 'comic' envelopes through 
the post — monstrous caricatures of yourself, or them- 
selves, sketched in pen and ink — waggish quatrains 
in the corner addressed to the postman, or to Mary 
the housemaid who took the letters in. They fondly 
hoped, the facetious ones, that the letter-carrier would 
crack his sides, that Mary would grin her broadest 
grin, at the sight of their funny letters. But Mary 
and the postman did nothing of the kind. Once in 
a way, perhaps, the hardworked servant of the G.P.O. 
who handed in the 4 comic' missive would observe, 
4 He must be a rum un as sent this ; but the remark 
was made more in grim disparagement than in hu- 
morous appreciation. As for Mary, she would still 
farther turn up that nasal organ for which nature 
had already done a good deal in the way of elevation, 
and would remark, i /wonder people isn't above such 
trumperies.' Mary knew and revered the sanctity 
of the post. Did you ever study the outsides of 
servants' letters? When the housemaid has a mili- 
tary sweetheart, he is generally in the pedestrian 
branch of the service, and his hand being as yet more 
accustomed to the plough than to the pen, he induces 
a smart sergeant to address his letters for him. The 
non-commissioned officer's stiff, up-and-down, orderly- 
room hand is not to be mistaken. He is very gallant 
to the housemaid. He always calls her ' Miss' Mary 
Hobbs ; but, on the other hand, he never omits to 
add a due recognition of yourself in the ' At William 
Penn's, Esq.' I have even known a sergeant ascend 



POSTE RESTANTE. 383 

to the regions of 'Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera/ and 
a flourish. Mary's old father, the ex-butcher, does 
not waste any vain compliments upon her or upon 
you. l Mary Hobbs, housemaid at Mr. Perm's.' He 
is a courteous old gentleman, nevertheless: and if 
Mary shows you her letter, which she does sometimes 
in pardonable pride at the proficiency of her papa, 
who, c although he was never no schollard and. going 
on for seventy-three, is as upright as a Maypole,' you 
will rarely fail to discover, in the postscript, that he 
has sent his ' duty' to you. 

But, I repeat, I have had enough in my time of 
the insides of letters, and I intend to write no more 
letters, and to read as few as ever I possibly can. 
With the aid of a poker, a good wide fireplace, and 
a box of matches, I got rid recently of a huge mass 
of old letters. It was the brightest of blazes, and 
you would have been astonished by the diminutive- 
ness of the pile of sooty ashes which remained in the 
grate after that bonfire. Yet have you not seen in 
the little frescoed pigeon-holes of the Roman Colum- 
baria, that a vase not much bigger than a gallipot 
will hold all that is mortal of one who was once 
senator, pro-consul, prsetor — what you please? The 
ashes of a lifetime's letters will not more than fill a 
dustpan. 

Dismissing the letters themselves, relegating them 
all to fiery death behind those bars, I linger over the 
envelopes ; I dwell upon the postmarks, I long to be 
in the distant lands to which those marks refer. 



384 UNDER THE SUN. 



There is vast room for speculation in the address of 
a letter, for, in the mass of handwritings you have 
seen, many have been forgotten. In the letter itself 
your curiosity is at once appeased, for you turn to 
the signature mechanically, and ten to one, if the 
letter be an old one, to read it gives you a sharp 
pang. Burn the letters, then; keep to the envelopes. 
Especially scan those which have been directed to 
you at hotels abroad. In very rare instances does 
the memory of a foreign hotel remind you of aught 
but pleasant things. You lived your life. The bills 
were heavy, but they were paid. You enjoyed. 
How good the pickled herrings were at the Oude- 
Doelen at the Hague! What a famous four-poster 
they put you into at the Old Bible in Amsterdam ! 
Could anything be better than the table -d'hote at 
the Hotel d'Angleterre at Berlin — save, perhaps, that 
at the Hotel de Russie, close by, and that other Russie 
at Frankfort ? That Drei Mohren at Augsburg was 
a good house too. What a cellar! what imperial 
tokay ! ? Tis true that the waiter at Basle swindled 
you in the matter of the Bremen cigars, which he 
declared to be Havanas ; but was not that little mis- 
hap amply atoned for at the Schweizer Hof, Lucerne, 
six hours afterwards? The Schweizer Hof! Dear 
me ! how happy you were, idling about all day long, 
peering at Mount Pilate, or watching, with never- 
ending interest, the tiny boats on the bosom of the 
great blue lake! Here is an envelope directed to 
you at Cernobbio; another at the Villa d'Este; an- 



POSTE RESTANTE. 385 

other at Bellaggio, on the Lake of Como. Here come 
Salo and Desenzano, on the Lake of Garda. Ah ! a 
villanous hostelry the last; but with what exultation 
you hurried back through Brescia to the clean and 
comfortable Hotel Cavour at Milan ! You were 
rather short of money, perhaps, when you arrived in 
the capital of Lombardy. Your stock of circular 
notes was growing small. No cash awaited you at 
the Albergo Cavour — nay, nor letters either. But 
there would be letters for you, it was certain, at the 
Poste Restante. Quick, Portiere, l un broum' — Mil- 
anese for brougham, and not very wide of the mark. 
You hasten to the Poste Restante. There the let- 
ters await you ; there is the stack of circular notes. 
Yes, and here among your envelopes at home is the 
banker's letter of advice, enumerating a hundred 
cities where he has agents who will gladly cash your 
notes at the current rate of exchange, deducting 
neither agio nor discount. 

The postage and the reception of a letter in 
foreign countries — notably the less civilised — are 
events accompanied by circumstances generally curi- 
ous and occasionally terrifying. I never saw a Chinese 
postman, but I can picture him as a kind of embodied 
bamboo, who presents you with your packet of cor- 
respondence with some preposterous ceremonial, or 
uses some outrageously hyperbolical locution to in- 
form you that your letter is insufficiently stamped. 
As for the Russian Empire, I can vouch personally 
for the whole postal system of that tremendous do- 

cc 



386 UNDER THE SUN 



minion being, sixteen years ago, environed with a 
network of strange observances. The prepayment 
of a letter from St. Petersburg to England involved 
the attendance at at least three separate departments 
of the imperial post-office, and the administration of 
at least one bribe to a clingy official with a stand-up 
collar to his napless tail-coat, and the symbolical 
buttons of the c Tchinn' on the band of his cap. As 
those who have ever made acquaintance with the 
stage doorkeepers of theatres in any part of the world 
are aware that those functionaries are generally eat- 
ing something from a basin (preferably yellow), so 
those who have ever been constrained to do business 
with a Russian government clerk of the lower grades 
will remember that, conspicuous by the side of the 
blotting-pad (under which you slipped the rouble notes 
when you bribed him), there was always a soddened 
blue pocket-handkerchief, the which, rolled up into 
a ball, or twisted into a thong, or waved wide like a 
piratical flag, served him alternately as a sign of con- 
tent, a gesture of refusal, or an emblem of defiance. 
You couldn't prepay your letter without this azure 
semaphore being put through the whole of its paces ; 
unless, indeed, previous to attending the post-office, 
you took the precaution of requesting some mercan- 
tile friend to affix the stamp of his firm to your 
envelope. Then the official pocket-handkerchief as- 
sumed permanently the spherical or satisfied stage, 
and you had, moreover, the satisfaction of knowing 
that the stamp of the firm might stand you in good 



POSTE RESTANTE. 387 

stead as an Eastern firman, and that in all probability 
your letter would not be opened and read as a pre- 
liminary to its being dispatched to its destination. 

So much for sending a letter, on which you seldom 
failed (purely through official oversight, of course) 
to be overcharged. There were two ways of receiv- 
ing a letter, both equally remarkable. I used to live 
in a thoroughfare called the Cadetten-Linie, in the 
island of Wassili-Ostrow. It was about three times 
longer than that Upper Wigmore-street to which Syd- 
ney Smith declared that there was no end. When 
any English friend had sufficiently mastered the mys- 
teries of Russian topographology as to write Cadetten- 
Linie and Wassili-Ostrow correctly, I got my letter. 
This was but seldom. It was delivered at the hotel 
where I resided in a manner which reminded me 
vaguely but persistently of the spectacle of Timour 
the Tartar, and of the Hetman Platoff leading a pulk 
of Cossacks over the boundless steppes of the Ukraine. 
The postman was one of the fiercest little men, with one 
of the fiercest and largest cocked-hats, I ever saw. His 
face was yellow in the bony and livid in the fleshy 
parts; and the huge moustache lying on his upper 
lip looked like a leech bound to suck away at him for 
evermore for some misdeeds of the Promethean kind. 

This Russian postman : don't let me forget his 
sword, with its rusty leather scabbard and its brazen 
hilt, which seemed designed, like Hudibras's, to hold 
bread and cheese; and not omitting, again, the half 
dozen little tin-pot crosses and medals attached by 



UNDER THE SUN. 



dirty scraps of particoloured ribbon to his breast; 
for this brave had i served/ and had only failed to 
obtain a commission because he was not c born.' This 
attache of St. Sergius-le- Grand, if that highly -re- 
spectable saint can be accepted as a Muscovite equiv- 
alent for our St. Martin of Aldersgate, used to come 
clattering down the Cadetten-Linie on a shaggy little 
pony, scattering the pigeons, and confounding the 
vagrant curs. You know the tremendous stir at a 
review, when a chief, for no earthly purpose that I 
know of, save to display his horsemanship and to put 
himself and his charger out of breath, sets off, at a 
tearing gallop, from one extremity of the line to the 
other : the cock feathers in the hats of his staff flying 
out behind them like foam from the driving waters. 
Well : the furious charge of a general on Plumstead 
Marshes was something like the pace of the Russian 
postman. If he had had many letters to deliver on 
his way, he would have been compelled to modify the 
ardour of his wild career; but it always seemed to 
me that nineteen-twentieths of the Cadetten-Linie 
were taken up by dead walls, painted a glaring yellow, 
and that the remaining twentieth was occupied by 
the house where I resided. It was a very impressive 
spectacle to see him bring up the little pony short 
before the gate of the hotel, dismount, look proudly 
around, caress the ever- sucking leech on his lip — as 
for twisting the ends of it, the vampire would never 
have permitted such a liberty — and beckon to some 
passing Ivan Ivanovitch, with a ragged beard and 



POSTE REST ANTE. 389 

caftan, to hold his steed, or in default of any prowl- 
ing Ivan being in the way, attach his pony's bridle 
to the palisades. It was a grand sound to hear 
him thundering — he was a little man, but he did 
thunder — up the stone stairs, the brass tip of his 
sword-scabbard bumping against his spurs, and his 
spurs clanking against the stones, and the gloves 
hanging from a steel ring in his belt, playing rub-a- 
dub-dub on the leather pouch which held his letters 
for delivery — my letters, my newspapers, when they 
hadn't been confiscated — with all the interesting par- 
agraphs neatly daubed out with black paint by the 
censor. And when this martial postman handed you 
a letter, you treated him to liquor, and gave him 
copecks. All this kind of thing is altered, I suppose, 
by this time in Russia. I have seen the lowest order 
of police functionary — and the martial postman was 
first cousin to a polizei — seize Ivan Ivanovitch, if he 
offended him, by his ragged head, and beat him with 
his sword-belt about the mouth until he made it bleed. 
Whereas, in these degenerate days, I am told, a Rus- 
sian gentleman who wears epaulettes, or a sword, is 
not allowed so much as to pull a droschky-driver's 
ears, or kick him in the small of the back, if he turn 
to the left instead of the right. Decidedly, the times 
are as much out of joint as a broken marionette. 

I have no doubt, either, that the transaction of 
prepaying a letter has been very much simplified 
since the period in which I visited Russia. The Poste 
Restante also has, of course, been sweepingly re- 



390 UNDER THE SUN. 

formed. Brooms were not used in Russia in my time, 
save for the purpose of thrashing Ivan Ivanovitch. 
The St. Petersburg Poste Restante in 1856 was one 
of the oddest institutions imaginable. It was a pru- 
dent course to take your landlord, or some Russian 
friend, with you, to vouch for your respectability. In 
any case, you were bound to produce your passport, 
or rather your ' permission to sojourn,' which had 
been granted to you — on your paying for it — when 
the police at Count OrlofFs had sequestrated your 
Foreign Office passport. When divers functionaries — 
all of the type of him with the blotting-pad and the 
blue pocket-handkerchief — were quite satisfied that 
you were not a forger of rouble notes, or an incen- 
diary, or an agent for the sale of M. Herzen's Kolo- 
Jcol, their suspicions gave way to the most unbounded 
confidence. You were ushered into a large room ; a 
sack of letters from every quarter of the globe was 
bundled out upon the table ; and you were politely 
invited to try if you could make out anything that 
looked as though it belonged to you. I am afraid 
that, as a rule, I did not obtain the property to which 
I was entitled, and somebody else had helped himself 
to that which belonged to me. I wonder who got 
my letters, and read them, or are they still moulder- 
ing in the Petropolitan Poste Restante ? 

Poste Restante ! Poste Restante ! I scan envelope 
after envelope. I know the Poste Restante in New 
York, with its struggling, striving crowd of German 
and Irish emigrants, craving for news from the dear 



POSTE REST ANTE. 391 

ones at home. In connection with this department 
of the American postal service, I may mention, that 
in the great Atlantic cities they have an admirable 
practice of issuing periodically alphabetical lists of 
persons for whom letters have arrived by the Eu- 
ropean mails i to be left till called for,' or whose 
addresses cannot be discovered. The latter cases are 
very numerous ; letters addressed, c Franz Hermann, 
Xew York,' or ' My Cousin Biddy in Amerikey,' not- 
being uncommon. 

I roam from pillar to post, always c Restante ;' and 
ten years slip away, and I come upon an envelope 
inscribed 'Poste Restante, Madrid.' There is ano- 
ther name for this traveller's convenience in Spanish, 
but I have forgotten it. Otherwise l Poste Restante' 
belongs to the universal language. Everybody knows 
what it means. The Madrilena Poste Restante is, 
like most other things of Spain, a marvel and a mys- 
tery. You reach the post-office itself by a dirty little 
street called, if I remember aright, the Calle de las 
Carretas, one of the thoroughfares branching from 
that Castilian Seven Dials, the Puerta del Sol. The 
entrance to the office is in a dingy little alley, lined 
with those agreeable blackened stone walls, relieved 
by dungeon-like barred windows, common in the cities 
of northern Spain. Opposite the post-office door cower 
a few little book-stalls, where you may buy cheap sta- 
tionery ' % and there, in a little hutch, in aspect between 
a sentry-box and a cobbler's- stall, used to sit a public 
scribe, who, for the consideration of a few reals, would 



392 UNDER THE SUN. 

indite petitions for such supplicants as deemed that 
their prayers would be more readily listened to by 
authority if they were couched in words of four syl- 
lables, and written in fat round characters, with flour- 
ishes or 4 parafos' to all the terminals. The scribe 
also would write love-letters for lovelorn swains of 
either sex, whose education had been neglected. 

I don't think I ever knew such a black, dirty, and 
decayed staircase as that of the Madrid post-office, 
save perhaps that of the Mont de Piete, Paris. You 
ascended, so it seemed, several flights, meeting on 
the way male and female phantoms, shrouded in 
cloaks or in mantillas. The mingled odour of tobacco 
smoke, of garlic, and of Spain — for Spain has its pe- 
culiar though indescribable odour — was wonderful. 
The odds were rather against you, when you visited 
the Poste Restante, that the occasion might be a feast 
or a fast day of moment. In either case the office 
opened late, and closed early ; and the hour selected 
for your own application was usually the wrong- 
one. If the postal machine were in gear, you pushed 
aside a green baize door and entered a long low 
apartment, with a vaulted roof of stone. Stuck against 
the whitewashed walls were huge placards covered 
with names more or less illegible. Knots of soldiers 
in undress stood calmly contemplating those lists. I 
don't think a tithe of the starers expected any letters; 
it was only another way of passing the time. A 
group of shovel-hatted priests would be gravely scan- 
ning another list ; a party of black-hooded women 



POSTE RESTANTE. 393 

would be gossiping before a third; and everybody 
would be smoking. 

You wandered into another vaulted room, and 
there you found your own series of lists — those of the 
4 estrangeros.' In the way of reading those lists 
madness lay. The schedules belonging to several 
months hung side by side. There were names re- 
peated thrice over, names written in different co- 
loured inks, names crossed out, names blotted, names 
altered, names jobbed at with a penknife so as to be 
indecipherable, by some contemplative spirit in a 
sportive mood. The arrangement of names was al- 
phabetical, but arbitrary. Sometimes the alphabet 
began at A, and sometimes at T. The system of 
indexing was equally mysterious. I will suppose 
your name to be Septimus Terminus Optimus Penn. 
To this patronymic and prefixes your correspondent 
in England has foolishly added the complimentary Es- 
quire. Under those circumstances the best thing you 
could do was to look for yourself under the head of 
'Esquire.' Failing in unearthing yourself, then you 
might try Optimus and Terminus, and so up to Penn. 
When you found yourself a number was affixed to you. 
At one extremity of the apartment was a grating, and 
behind that grating sat an old gentleman in a striped 
dressing-gown and a black velvet skull-cap. If you 
can imagine a very tame and sleepy tiger at the Zoo- 
logical Gardens, smoking a cigarito, and with bundles 
of letters and newspapers, in lieu of shin bones of 
beef, to eat, you may realise the idea of that old gen- 



394 UNDER THE SUN 



tleman in his cage at the Poste Eestante behind the 
Puerta del Sol. You spake him kindly, and called 
him c Caballero.' He bowed profoundly and returned 
your compliment. Then you told him your number, 
and handed your passport through the bars. He 
looked at the number and he looked at the passport. 
Then he kindled another cigarito ; then, in a preoccu- 
pied manner, he began the perusal of a leading article 
in the Epoca of that morning. Then after a season, 
remembering you, he arose, offered you a thousand 
apologies, and went away out of the cage altogether, 
retiring into some back den — whether to look for your 
letters, or to drink his chocolate, or to offer his orisons 
to San Jago de Compostella, is uncertain. By this 
time there were generally two or three free and inde- 
pendent Britons clamouring at the bars — the Briton 
who threatened to write to the Times; the Briton who 
declared that he should place the whole matter in the 
hands of the British ambassador; and the persistent 
Briton who simply clung to the grate, or battered at 
the doortrap with an umbrella, crying, ' Hi ! Mossoo ! 
Donnez-moi mon letter. Larrup, Milk-street, Cheap- 
side, a Londres. Donnez-moi. Look alive, will you !' 
At last the old gentleman returned, lighted another 
cigarito, and began to look for your letters. For 
whose letters is he looking now, I wonder, and where ? 
Poste Eestante! Poste Restante! It has rested 
for me close to the Roman Pantheon, and under the 
shadow of that blood-stained sacrificial stone by the 
great Cathedral of Mexico. Poste Restante ! How 



POSTE RESTANTE. 395 

many times have I journeyed towards it with flutter- 
ing pulse and a sinking in my throat — how many 
times have I come from it with my pocket full of 
dollars, or my eyes full of tears; tears that were 
sometimes of joy, and sometimes — but not often — of 
sorrow! The Poste Restante has been to me, these 
many years, a smooth and a kind post, on the whole. 



THE END. 



LONDON : 
BOBSON AND SONS, PRINTERS, TANCRAS ROAD, N.W. 



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